Think of the current AI boom like ketchup. 🍅 We’re pouring massive, expensive models on everything, indiscriminately. But what if we treated AI more like hot sauce? 🌶️ Applied strategically, in the right dose, to solve highly specific local problems.
Right now, we’re being sold a "single story" of AI: massive data centers, trillion-dollar valuations, and synthetic super-intelligence. But there is a powerful alternative narrative happening right under our noses—one about *shared agency*.
Instead of renting sovereignty from big tech, look at Barbados, which got its own sovereign AI infrastructure shipped to it in a container. Instead of data extraction, look at the Siekopai people of the Amazon, who are using AI to map and reclaim their ancestral land (and own their data).
As Audrey Tang so brilliantly put it: We need to stop thinking about "humans in the loop of AI" and start putting "AI in the loop of humanity."
The future shouldn't be measured by how much intelligence we can concentrate in one system, but by how much agency we can distribute across the world.
What do you think—are we too obsessed with the "bigger is better" AI story? 👇