The Age of Artificial Intelligence: The Greater Equaliser or Divider?

The question of whether AI is an equaliser or a divider gets asked as if there is one answer, but there isn't one. It depends entirely on where you are and who has access to it.

For anyone with a reliable connection and a device to use it on, AI has made it significantly cheaper to access information, create content, and automate tasks that used to take much longer. For freelancers and small businesses with limited resources, that is a real difference.

But the prerequisite for all of this is infrastructure. Data plans, computers, tablets, and basic digital literacy are not things everyone has access to. In rural and low-income communities globally, the gap is not just about the lack of AI. It is about not having any of those things in the first place. This is not a new problem. AI is just making it harder to catch up.

Access is only part of the problem. The bias in these systems is not a bug. It is built in. AI systems are trained on historical data, which embeds historical inequality. Hiring algorithms that favour certain profiles, facial recognition that works less accurately on darker skin tones, predictive policing tools that reinforce existing patterns of enforcement: these are not glitches. They are what you get when the world you are building on was already unequal.

Most of the conversation is still about what AI can do. Less of it is about who builds it and who it is actually built for. And almost none of it is about what happens to the people who never got a say in any of it.