AI pessimism is a luxury the Global South cannot afford

No Ethiopian, Pakistani, Indian, Brazilian or other serious policymaker believes artificial intelligence will solve corruption or improve governance overnight. National policies such as Digital Ethiopia 2030, Pakistan’s National AI Policy 2025 or other initiatives in Chile, Argentina and Colombia consider AI as a means to enhance service delivery in healthcare, education, agriculture, taxation and disaster management, rather than as institutional reform.These are practical applications. Precision farming, an AI-based technology, is used in agriculture-based economies to maximise limited resources, increase production and improve climate resilience, directly affecting the food security of billions of people. In medicine, AI applications enhance diagnosis and coverage in underserved communities with limited physicians. Adaptive learning platforms are used in education to close gaps in literacy and skills. These applications are about dealing with limits on growth, not faking solutions to politics.Past analogies are educative. Mobile phones and digital payments did not fix governance in Kenya or India, but M-Pesa changed the face of finance inclusion and the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) accelerated economic formalisation. AI is the next level of leapfrogging. With current digital public infrastructure as the foundation, it is providing more efficient and scalable services. To rule this out as magical thinking is to ignore how technology has facilitated faster catch-up growth in developing contexts many times over.Critics emphasise Western attention to protection, prejudice, ecological cost and activism such as the QuitGPT movement. This applies to wealthy societies with well-developed infrastructure, high digital literacy and well-established institutions. But for much of the Global South, stagnation, youth unemployment, low productivity and lack of access to services are the immediate threats, not overadoption.The negative view of AI usually comes from a place of privilege where fundamental needs are satisfied – pessimism is for those who can afford to despair. Young, developing countries cannot afford to miss technological waves if they don’t want to fall further behind. AI has the potential to contribute trillions of dollars to the world economy in the next few years and the Global South can gain significantly (although initially at a smaller scale) through productivity in such areas as retail, finance and healthcare.Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the benefits of AI can be even greater in the Global South where it can be used to address problems hindering catch-up growth. The central concern, that Global South nations will become passive consumers in the absence of local ecosystems, is worth noting, but there are signs that proactive measures are being taken.Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, speaks at the 56th annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 20. Photo: Reuters