Leapfrogging into the Dark: Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of Developmental Transcendence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is recognised as a general-purpose technology capable of compressing developmental trajectories, transcending historical constraints, and catalysing broad-based economic progress in the Global South. In Africa particularly, an increasingly prominent Promethean discourse imagines AI as possessing a uniquely elastic and scalar capacity for cross-sectoral integration, capable of generating developmental gains across healthcare, education, agriculture, finance, and public administration; the dream, in its fullest iteration, being of a continent that inherits abundance without enduring the long, grinding ordeal of industrialisation that was, in any case, never fully permitted to run its course. In their more modest expression, these visions are not unsubstantiated – cases of AI-assisted healthcare delivery in Kenya and AI-enabled education services in Rwanda, inter alia, lend credence to AI’s elasticity. Yet, given the scale of capital investment and depths of institutional capacity required for their realisation, the conditions underpinning these claims nevertheless warrant closer examination.
