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：围绕人工通用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是相同的。较少关注先进AI系统如何与现有全球不平等相互作用。本文考察了AGI对全球南方人民的影响，指出高度自主的通用认知系统的可用性并不能保证公平结果。我们证实，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AGI为全球每个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，使已边缘化群体不仅在经济学上隐形，而且在功能上与全球系统无关。我们将这一分析基于当代AI部署的经验信号，并延伸至潜在发展轨迹，重点阐明拉丁美洲、非洲和南亚面临的风险与机遇路径。