Payal Arora is a Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University, and Co-Founder of FemLab, a feminist futures of work initiative. She is a digital anthropologist and author of award-winning books including ‘The Next Billion Users’ with Harvard Press.

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These are live-blogged notes from a session at NEXT24 in Hamburg. As such, they are prone to error, inaccuracy and lamentable crimes against grammar and syntax. Posts will be improved in the coming days and this note updated.

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Have you heard of BYD Auto? BYD stands for “Build Your Dreams” — a Chinese car brand. In 2011, Elon Musk mocked them. In 2024, it overtook Tesla as the leading BEV manufacturer. It’s just another example of the West overestimating itself, and underestimating the rest of the world.

China has brought the greatest number of people out of poverty in the shortest amount of time, by building a technology industry that could compete with Silicon Valley. The Global South wants to be China, not the US, these days. The Global South is 85% of the world’s population — and 90% of the young. That’s where the business and services of tomorrow are developing.

While growing up, her family had to wait 11 years for a phone connection, and a bike was a luxury good. Today, India is one of the countries with the cheapest mobile broadband. Asia is at the forefront of fintech. India has built a digital public infrastructure. Why does that matter?

IndiaStack is an open-source alternative to Google and Apple, that allows entrepreneurs to get going within the thin margins and App Store taxes of the West.

The Global South: optimism and innovation

The Global South is young by nature — it’s enthusiastic and full of excitement. It’s also horny — and what’s the biggest driver of getting people online…? They live in deeply conservative societies, so they can find other types of companionship online. They become creators because they see their future as being online.

And that leads to innovation, like these:

• Editrix
• [Lelapa AI]
• Anghami
  

They’re pioneering LLMs in their own languages and dialects because they’re not being done elsewhere. These will be more powerful models because they’re tailored to those populations.

Why is the West so pessimistic?

People in these countries are more optimistic about their future than those of us in the West. And they’re much more optimistic about the impact of AI across all domains. Why are we so miserable? We’re still wealthy — and we live in liberal democracies, which most of the rest still don’t.

Is it the post-imperial crash, summed up by Brexit? Is it a declining influence in the world? Or is it the loss of control? The change of life, language, cultural values… Immigration is highly correlated with innovation (and patents!)

For the Global South, and its young population, there’s a desperate need to come up with new things to avoid a disaffected youth and civil wars. But we have a lot of challenges globally, so we can’t afford an “us versus them” mentality in fighting them. Pessimism is a privilege of the comfortable, and very soon none of us might be comfortable.