Southeast Asia’s AI dilemma

The structure of the new AI world is being designed and built today, but large parts of the Global South are not among its architects. Along with the rest of the Global South, Southeast Asia finds itself in the global AI economy as a consumer, a reservoir of natural resources and cheap labor, and a key provider of the data that powers the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Beyond the recent progressive efforts at data regulation, the development of national AI strategies, ministerial declarations and local “unicorns” building on foreign cloud infrastructure, lies a fundamental question: are these digital instruments of technological sovereignty and economic productivity or rather symptoms of increasing dependency, democratic erosion and a foreclosure of the region’s techno-scientific future?

Like Dante’s descent into successive circles of hell, this article moves through layers of increasing structural depth, each darker and more brutal than the last. Guided by history…