CONCEPT
The AI-Underdeveloped
Escobar's extension of his foundational insight into the AI transition: the discursive construction of a new global category of deficiency — populations classified as lacking AI capability — that mirrors Truman's 1949 construction of the underdeveloped world and legitimizes the same pattern of intervention.
The AI discourse that crystallized in the mid-2020s performs the same discursive operation that Truman performed in 1949. Billions of people who have lived through their own knowledge systems are now reclassified as lacking AI capability, awaiting the remedy that the technology apparatus is uniquely positioned to provide. The vocabulary has been modernized. The institutional actors wear different logos. But the underlying grammar — the discursive architecture that constructs a population as deficient, positions a technology as the remedy, and presents distribution as liberation — remains intact. The category is not discovered empirically. It is constructed discursively, by a framework that measures human capability against the standard of what AI tools provide.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The construction operates through specific mechanisms. Adoption rates define success. Productivity multipliers confirm the technology's value. The expansion of the user base generates data that improves the models, which increases the