CONCEPT
Double Displacement
Juma's name for the compounded transition cost borne when a new innovation displaces both traditional practices and the nascent modern practices that had only recently replaced them.
Double displacement occurs when an innovation simultaneously displaces traditional practices and the nascent modern practices that had only recently replaced them. In several African countries, traditional record-keeping was displaced by computer-based systems in the 1990s and 2000s, requiring enormous institutional investment in training, infrastructure, and organizational change. Those computer-based systems are now being displaced by AI-assisted systems, requiring a second round of investment before returns on the first round have been fully realized. The compounded transition costs fall on populations that have not recovered from the first displacement, producing a sense of perpetual institutional vertigo that erodes the social trust effective adaptation requires.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept emerged from Juma's work on technology policy in African contexts, where he repeatedly observed that developing economies were being asked to absorb multiple technological transitions simultaneously, with no recovery period between them. The pattern is not unique to developing economies — small towns in industrial America experienced similar compounding as manufacturing employment was displaced first