Beyond the binary: Navigating AI’s uncertain future in Africa
Rose M. Mutiso • April 3, 2024
This piece was originally published in Science by Rose M. Mutiso on April 3, 2025. Republished in full with permission. Read the original post here.
The artificial intelligence (AI) debate is increasingly polarized in Africa, mirroring a trend across the globe. On one side, utopian headlines, such as “5 Ways To Harness AI And End Poverty Forever,” claim that AI will revolutionize development. On the other, warnings that “AI Is Bad News for the Global South” paint the technology as an inevitable amplifier of inequality and exploitation.
This binary framing fails to capture the complex reality we face: AI, like most technologies, has the potential to both improve and worsen various aspects of human life, with impacts that are difficult to predict and could fall anywhere in the spectrum between catastrophic and miraculous. But the real danger of binary thinking is not just distortion, it’s paralysis. By reducing AI to either a miracle or a menace, we lose the ability to make sound decisions under real-world uncertainty. This is a global challenge but takes on particular urgency in Africa, where rapid technological shifts intersect with deep structural constraints and specific development challenges.
At its core, polarized thinking reflects a common human tendency to simplify complexity and resolve uncertainty through extreme narratives, either minimizing risk or exaggerating it into catastrophe or utopia. We see this pattern in AI discourse but also in many other contexts with complex and uncertain implications for society, such as climate change.
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