CONCEPT

Global Golden Age

The test of whether the AI deployment phase can produce broadly shared prosperity across the Global South as well as the advanced economies — or whether it will replicate the geographic exclusions of previous golden ages.

Hermas Ayi's objection to the Perez framework — that the model assumes synchronous global advancement while markets are interconnected but temporalities remain profoundly unequal — illuminates the most uncomfortable feature of the golden age concept. Previous golden ages were golden ages for the advanced economies. They were not golden ages for the colonized world, the developing world, or the populations excluded from the institutional infrastructure that produced broadly shared prosperity in Europe and North America. If the AI golden age replicates this pattern — broadly shared within the advanced economies, extractive in its relationship to the Global South — it will not be a golden age in any morally defensible sense.

In The You On AI Field Guide

The AI paradigm creates conditions that could, for the first time, genuinely globalize the golden age's distribution. The technology that collapses the imagination-to-artifact ratio does so regardless of geography. The developer in Lagos, the entrepreneur in Accra, the teacher in rural India — all can, in principle, access the same capability-enhancing tools as the engineer in San Francisco. The democratization of capability is structurally more universal than the democratizations of previous revolutions.

But "in principle" is not "in practice," and the gap between principle and practice is filled by precisely the institutional infrastructure that the deployment phase must build: connectivity, education, financial access, governance, regulatory frameworks. The capability gap between those who can convert AI tools into human functioning and those who cannot is mediated by infrastructure that varies dramatically across geographies.

The global dimension of the AI golden age is therefore not an afterthought. It is a test of whether the deployment-phase institutions are genuinely deployment-phase institutions or merely a new form of the advanced economies' self-regarding prosperity. The structural question is whether the political coalitions that might build deployment-phase institutions include populations historically excluded from previous golden ages' benefits, or whether they reproduce the exclusions of earlier settlements.

Achille Mbembe's work on the colonial genealogy of digital infrastructure illuminates the stakes. The data pipelines, model weights, and platform governance structures of the AI revolution inherit the structural logic of earlier colonial infrastructures. Whether the AI golden age breaks this pattern or extends it depends on political choices that have not yet been made.

Origin

The global dimension of Perez's framework has been developed by scholars including Hermas Ayi, working from African perspectives on the synchronic assumptions of the original model. The Carlota Perez book in the You On AI cycle integrates these critiques explicitly.

Key Ideas

Previous exclusions. Earlier golden ages excluded colonized and developing populations.

The AI paradigm creates conditions that could, for the first time, genuinely globalize the golden age's distribution

Structural possibility. AI's democratization of tools is geographically universal in principle.

Institutional gap. Realizing the possibility requires infrastructure that varies dramatically across regions.

Moral test. An AI golden age that replicates geographic exclusions fails the name.

Political coalitions. Global deployment requires coalitions that include historically excluded populations.

In The You On AI Field Guide

Origin

Key Ideas

Related Entries

Further Reading