The Invisibility Hypothesis: Promises of AGI and the Future of the Global South

TL;DR

This paper explores how AGI could either democratize access to knowledge globally or deepen existing inequalities, especially affecting marginalized populations in the Global South, based on current AI deployment signals.

Contribution

It analyzes the social implications of AGI for the Global South, emphasizing potential pathways that could either reduce or exacerbate inequalities.

Findings

AGI may democratize knowledge and services globally.

Existing inequalities could be amplified by AGI.

Empirical signals suggest varied impacts for Latin America, Africa, and South Asia.

Abstract

Discussions surrounding Artificial General Intelligence have largely focused on technical feasibility, timelines, and existential risk, often treating its social impact as being the same across different populations. Less attention has been paid to how advanced AI systems may interact with existing global inequalities. This paper examines the implications of AGI for people in the Global South, arguing that the availability of highly autonomous, general-purpose cognitive systems does not guarantee equitable outcomes. We establish that, as scientific discovery, economic coordination, and governance become increasingly automated, the relevance of human individuals may become conditional on access to infrastructure, institutional inclusion, and geopolitical circumstances rather than skills or intelligence. Under this setting, the Global South faces different pathways: in the best case, geographic location is no longer relevant as AGI fully democratizes access to knowledge and essential services for everyone in the globe; in the worst case, existing structural constraints are severely amplified, rendering already marginalized populations not merely economically invisible, but functionally irrelevant to global systems. We ground this analysis in empirical signals from contemporary AI deployment and extend to potential trajectories, highlighting both risk and opportunity pathways for Latin America, Africa, and South Asia.