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

Leopoldo Julian Lechuga Lopez, Luis Lara

Track: Track 2: Socio-Economical and Future Visions

Keywords: AGI, Global South, Social Invisibility

TL;DR: We evaluate the effects of AGI on Global South populations comparing the ideal and worst case scenario in which people become economically invisible to an AI-driven world system.

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.

Anonymization: This submission has been anonymized for double-blind review via the removal of identifying information such as names, affiliations, and identifying URLs.

Presenter: ~Luis_Lara1

Format: Maybe: the presenting author will attend in person, contingent on other factors that still need to be determined (e.g., visa, funding).

Funding: Yes, the presenting author of this submission falls under ICLR’s funding aims, and funding would significantly impact their ability to attend the workshop in person.

Submission Number: 26