By Abdulhameed Ridwanullah
This week, the article titled “Something Big Is Happening” was published on X by AI entrepreneur Matt Shumer. It became viral with around 80million views, 36k retweets, 105k likes and 5.7k comments at the moment of this writing. The virality stems from the central thesis of the post – AI disruption of white-collar jobs within years. Days later, the CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman, while granting an interview to the Financial Times, claimed that the tasks undertaken by white-collar workers will be automated within 12 to 18 months (watch the details in the video). Previously, Dario Amodei predicted that up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs would be automated within one to five years in his January 2026 essay.
All week, the debate has been whether AI will take your job. The discourse is loud. Spoiler alert! The discourse is almost entirely about the West. The Global South is often an afterthought. So, when I read Shumer say, “the experience everyone else is about to have,” or Suleyman say, “most tasks fully automated in 18 months”, I ask: Whose experience? Automated for whom?
The West debates whether AI will take their jobs. Much of Africa is still waiting for the jobs AI is supposedly coming to replace.
Most importantly, studies have shown that automated AI moderation barely works in the Global South (read the CDT study by Mona Elswah and her colleagues here). In my PhD research, I study how AI content moderation systems fail in Nigerian languages. The failures are systematic, not incidental. Moreover, there are over 2000 languages in Africa. AI moderation seldom works in 3 major Nigerian languages. There is a wide gap between what Silicon Valley promises about AI and the deliverables to the world population. That is the story.
Moreso, this doomsday discourse about new technology is not new. The pattern is real. Connor Boyack’s rejoinder (AI isn’t coming for your future. Fear is) beautifully captures by invoking Bastiat’s insight about the “seen and unseen” changes brought by new technology. The debate all week has been focused on the “seen”, but the “unseen” invoked by Boyack are the new industries and possibilities that emerge when technology reduces costs and eliminates drudgery. No doubt, every major technology disruption has eventually created more than it destroyed. If anything, Africa’s unofficial content creation economy is a pointer to such an opportunity.
However, the challenge is that the benefits are never evenly distributed. They are concentrated where infrastructure exists, languages are resourced, and capital flows. The boom and doom are not the same for a worker in London or Boston and someone in Cape Town, Lagos, Kano or Nairobi. One pays $20 ChatGPT subscription and enlists AI as a co-pilot. But the other is faced with the unseen failure of AI moderation, wreaking havoc in their community. This inequality runs in both directions: who benefits from AI’s capabilities and who is harmed by its failures.
So, the future of AI is not one story. It is two. While professionals in well-resourced economies leverage, adapt, upskill and thrive, billions of people in low-resource economies remain in the blind spot of a technology that was never designed for them.
The real question is not whether AI will take your job. It is whether AI will equally serve everyone or continue to perpetuate historical inequality.
This is the conversation we should all be having.
Abdulhameed Ridwanullah is a doctoral researcher working on AI and platform studies in Nigeria at Media for Empowerment and Impact Lab, Northeastern University, Boston. He can be reached at olaitanrido@yahoo.com
