The Problem With Bringing AI Where There Is No Infrastructure
Not long ago I made a video about why it is such a huge issue for companies like Microsoft to walk into African based countries and say, let us come here and educate your people about AI. What makes the video I stitched so beautiful is that the woman in it goes even deeper. Before anyone talks about jobs, there is no infrastructure. None. No hardware, no software, no shared knowledge base sitting underneath the promise. So where is it?
If things are analog and a region is not digitally advanced, how is all of that data these companies want to collect on the continent supposed to move? How does the work flow if the foundation to carry it does not exist? In my original video I said it plainly. You are creating wastelands. You are creating wastelands because you are teaching people how to feed data into a machine, but not how to educate themselves on what they are able to do with that data for their own benefit. I knew I was not far off from what is happening, and the proof keeps coming back around.
Why This Is Colonization Three Point Zero
As much as people stay against the whole AI conversation, the wiser move is to treat AI as a resource. A resource you build your own systems and your own infrastructure on, whether for a local community, a whole country, or a region. Build inside that community what I say all the time. Economy. I am not talking out of the side of my neck. I know exactly what I am saying.
When nations let outside companies build new wastelands, that is a new form of colonizing. You destabilize a nation when you do not allow it to own its infrastructure, build its own systems, or even think through how a homegrown system serves its own people. Instead these companies arrive and lean on human capital where labor rights are thin and human rights protections are unclear. They take, they keep the intellectual property, and what they extract does not land in the pockets of the country. One lump sum gets traded with a government, and that is the end of it. No prolonged return on investment for a whole nation, a whole region, a whole country.
Human Capital As The New Natural Resource
This is the part that stings. The brilliant minds with roots in African based nations study, then go abroad for a better life and a stronger education. How many return to pour that knowledge back into those regions? Returning physically is not even required. From wherever they sit, founders and builders are able to set up infrastructures and systems with a global connection that serves the people back home. That option exists.
So this is the sophisticated version of an old pattern. Data being trained, programs being built, all of it at a low cost because the infrastructure and the systems carry no agency for the people doing the work. No authorship. No property. No claim. Nobody is in a position to own any of it. This is how you exhaust a nation, and this time it is not through natural resources. It is through human capital, placing people at a level where they are blocked from rising.
AI As A Resource To Build Your Own Economy
If you sit in one of the regions in the southern hemisphere and you have the opportunity to educate people about AI, using that opportunity becomes the whole point. Think about how your products and services need to move, then aim AI at building infrastructure and systems that make a region digitally strong. The moment a place becomes digitally strong, it competes on the same level as China, India, or any other rising country.
There is one side of the world the Western world watches with fear, the Asian side. They want you to hear about every investment headline while staying quiet about that fear, because those nations are growing like weeds everywhere. The same growth is available to content creators, influencers, and creative founders anywhere who treat technology as a tool for content creation, workflow automation, and ownership rather than dependence.
Stop Fearing The Copy, Start Building Strategy
People are scared. Scared their work gets copied. Listen, if you do not want your work copied, put your work behind a paywall. Know what you are sharing on these platforms, and protect the rest. Well, how will people find me? Be inventive, or come to mcjstudio.me and I will think through a strategy with you, the same way a creative agency builds social media management and social media creation around what makes you, you.
Here is the truth. Work was copied long before AI went public. This is the second and third edition of the same wasteland model, sharpened with new tools.
Reading The Headlines For What They Are
So when you see the headline that says twenty five million invested by corporate name X into a country, understand the math. They already earned it back. The investment returned to them before the ink dried. I said it. I definitely said it.
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Sources
[1] Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism, Stanford University Press, 2019. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=28816 This work names data colonialism directly and supports the argument that collecting data without local ownership repeats historical extraction, reinforcing the wastelands point.
[2] Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI Power Politics and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, Yale University Press, 2021. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300209570/atlas-of-ai/ Crawford documents the hidden labor and human capital behind AI systems, supporting the claim that low cost training rests on workers who hold no agency or authorship.
[3] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Bogle L Ouverture Publications, 1972. https://archive.org/details/howeuropeunderde0000rodn This classic supports the framing of exhausting a nation through extraction, drawing the line from past colonization to the digital version described here.
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