Planetary Ethics

The AI revolution is planetary in its reach, in its infrastructure, and in its consequences. The training corpus draws from every accessible human tradition. The data centers span continents. The affected populations include everyone whose labor was absorbed, whose data was harvested, whose cognitive environment is shaped by model outputs, or whose livelihood is reorganized by AI-mediated markets. An ethics adequate to this scale cannot be national, sectoral, or parochial. It must be planetary. But a planetary ethics that merely universalizes the values of the metropolitan center repeats the colonial move of treating particular values as universal. Mbembe's proposal: an ethics that holds both dimensions — the genuine interconnectedness that requires planetary-scale thinking, and the genuine inequality that requires attention to the specific conditions of specific populations.