The Great AI Inversion
How the Global South Loses or Wins - Part 1
Yesterday I published an essay in French about AI’s impact on developing countries (the so-called Global South), and in particular on Madagascar - where I’m from.
It’s a very long piece, I poured my heart into it. I’ll love you if you read the whole thing :-) But I totally get it if not.
If anything because it’s neither in your language nor is it your reality.
Here is a TL:DR version in English - a 2-minute read tops.
Here it goes, hold my hand.
Part 1 below. Part 2 tomorrow.
AI is a civilizational tech
Like the steam engine or electricity, or the printing press. Maybe even bigger.
Most of the angst around AI is fair
Loss of jobs, human creativity, concentration of power, etc.- I’ve abundantly written about those myself. But it misses another shockwave: what AI does to the Global South (which btw is over 80% of humanity ...)
AI impacts the South on 3 fronts:
1) It kicks away an economic ladder: For 30 years, outsourcing was how the South climbed - call centers, back-office, the codifiable, repeatable work I call the first layer of friction. That’s exactly the layer AI eats first.
2) It flattens our cultures: Frontier models are trained on whatever digital corpus is available - overwhelmingly Western, overwhelmingly English, Nothing malicious here. It’s just what’s online. Some timid counter-efforts exist though. But the risk of “epistemic flattening” is real, a loss of cultural richness for all our kids and grandkids.
3) It demands infrastructure the South doesn’t have. And worse, AI may price them out: AI runs on power, networks, compute. Much of the South still lacks reliable electricity. And today’s cheap AI is heavily subsidized; serious scale use will soon get expensive (it’s the rise of the token economy).
Net-net, on top of the old Digital Divide, a new one lurks: the 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗗𝗶𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲: those who can afford frontier cognition, and everyone else.
So yeah, AI is pretty gloomy for the South -
But here is my great hope:
AI is a massive inversion of the old global arbitrage.
For decades, the West rented the South’s cheap labor. Now, for the first time, the South could rent cheap cognition.
Google democratized information access. AI may democratize cognition density.
To be continued tomorrow ...