How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming the Developing World

This book is about that transformation. It is a story of genuine promise and genuine peril, and intellectual honesty requires that both be examined without flinching. The promise is real: AI offers developing nations an opportunity to leapfrog not just legacy infrastructure but legacy disadvantage.

The peril is equally real: if the tools are designed elsewhere, deployed without local input, owned by corporations in distant countries, and calibrated on data that does not reflect local realities, AI could replicate — and in some cases accelerate — the inequalities that have defined the relationship between the wealthy world and the developing world for generations.

The pages that follow move through four major domains where this tension is most acutely felt: agriculture, healthcare, education, and the broader question of what it means to govern AI in ways that serve rather than exploit the world's most vulnerable populations.

Each section combines global analysis with on-the-ground case studies, because the question of whether AI is helping or hurting in any given context cannot be answered from a distance. It requires looking closely at specific programs, specific communities, specific outcomes.