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,