From The Diplomat, April 10:
The region faces the modern iteration of a question that has plagued every industrial revolution: who owns the machine, who works it, who extracts the surplus, and who bears the cost?
The structure of the new AI world is being designed and built today yet large parts of the global south are not among its architects. Along with the rest of the Global South, Southeast Asia finds itself positioned in the global AI economy as a consumer, a reservoir of natural resources and cheap labor, and the primary supplier of the data powering the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Beyond recent, progressive data regulation efforts, the crafting of national AI strategies, ministerial declarations, and local “unicorns” built on foreign cloud infrastructure, lies a foundational question: are these digital instruments of technological sovereignty and economic productivity, or rather symptoms of intensifying dependency, democratic erosion, and foreclosure of the region’s techno-scientific future?
Like Dante’s descent into successive circles of hell, this article moves through layers of increasing structural depth, each darker and more unsparing than the last. Guided by history and political economy, I travel downward from the surface layer of policy, compliance frameworks, and AI adoption, through AI’s physical infrastructure, and the deep tectonic plates of the stratified and unequal world-system.
This epistemic movement reveals a historical pattern. From the colonial plantation to the data center, from the steam engine to the GPU cluster, every industrial revolution returns to an unresolved techno-societal puzzle: how does technology shape the relation between society, labor, productivity and surplus, and how does surplus shape the social body and its institutions?
For Southeast Asia’s 700 million population, the dilemma brought about by this AI wave is the latest iteration of the perennial question that has haunted humanity since the first industrial revolution in the 18th century.
AI’s Transformative Potential?
The sociotechnical infrastructure of Southeast Asia is increasingly anchored to a rapidly expanding ensemble of digital and AI technologies. Large language models (LLMs), computer vision systems, facial recognition tools, and embedded predictive recommendation engines, and so on are now deployed at scale. These technologies are increasingly employed and operationalized across e-commerce platforms, public service delivery, financial systems, border control, education, policing, and surveillance networks. Their cumulative effect is a fundamental reorganization of the state apparatus, social relations, urban infrastructure, and the economics of the region.
The dominant interpretation of this transformation is one of techno-progressivism and “charting paths into a brave new world.” Techno-optimists have been quick to announce that Southeast Asia will be “a burgeoning hub for AI innovation” one that has already attracted $30 billion in AI infrastructure and $50 billion investment in AI. The ASEAN ministerial meeting on Science, Technology and Innovation (AMMSTI) released a statement in June 2024 declaring that AI has “significant transformative potential,” and is a “key driver of technological advancement and innovation.” The meeting noted that AI may possibly result “in a 10 to 18% GDP uplift, valued at approximately USD1 trillion by the year 2030.” The market appears to share this worldview, with a report in The Business Times in March 2026 announcing that “81 per cent of South-east Asian companies [are] already piloting and scaling AI-powered projects.”....
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