Discussions surrounding Artificial General Intelligence have largely focused on technical feasibility, timelines, and existential risk, often treating its social impact as being the same across different populations. Less attention has been paid to how advanced AI systems may interact with existing global inequalities. This paper examines the implications of AGI for people in the Global South, arguing that the availability of highly autonomous, general-purpose cognitive systems does not guarantee equitable outcomes. We establish that, as scientific discovery, economic coordination, and governance become increasingly automated, the relevance of human individuals may become conditional on access to infrastructure, institutional inclusion, and geopolitical circumstances rather than skills or intelligence. Under this setting, the Global South faces different pathways: in the best case, geographic location is no longer relevant as AGI fully democratizes access to knowledge and essential services for everyone in the globe; in the worst case, existing structural constraints are severely amplified, rendering already marginalized populations not merely economically invisible, but functionally irrelevant to global systems. We ground this analysis in empirical signals from contemporary AI deployment and extend to potential trajectories, highlighting both risk and opportunity pathways for Latin America, Africa, and South Asia.

翻译：围绕通用人工智能的讨论主要聚焦于技术可行性、时间表和存在性风险，往往将其社会影响视为对不同人群均等。对于先进人工智能系统如何与现有全球不平等相互作用的问题则关注较少。本文考察了通用人工智能对全球南方人民的影响，论证高度自主的通用认知系统的可用性并不能保证公平的结果。我们指出，随着科学发现、经济协调和治理日益自动化，人类个体的相关性可能将取决于基础设施获取、制度包容性和地缘政治环境，而非技能或智力。在此背景下，全球南方面临不同发展路径：最佳情况下，地理位置不再重要，因为通用人工智能为全球所有人完全民主化了知识和基本服务的获取；最坏情况下，现有结构性约束被严重放大，使已被边缘化的人群不仅在经济学意义上隐形，更在全球系统中变得功能无关。我们将这一分析基于当代人工智能部署的经验信号，并延伸至潜在发展轨迹，着重阐明拉丁美洲、非洲和南亚地区面临的风险与机遇路径。