Artificial Intelligence and the Reconfiguration of Global Inequality: A World-Systems Approach to the Digital South

• In Event: AI, Digital Capitalism, and Infrastructural Power

Abstract

The concept of the Global South has long been employed to analyze structural inequalities rooted in colonial legacies, capitalist expansion, and epistemic domination. However, the rapid rise of artificial intelligence and digital infrastructures calls for a renewed theoretical engagement with these global hierarchies. This article argues that AI-driven capitalism does not transcend but rather reorganizes core–periphery relations within the world-system. From data extraction and low-paid digital labor to environmental degradation and infrastructural dependency, the Global South functions as a crucial site through which Northern technology firms externalize economic, social, and ecological costs. By mobilizing world-systems analysis, the article demonstrates how AI infrastructures extend historical patterns of unequal exchange while introducing new modalities of control, surveillance, and accumulation. The digitalization of capitalism thus deepens existing asymmetries even as it reshapes the spatial and temporal dynamics of global inequality.

Author

• Sung Hee Ru, Hankyong National University, South Korea