The Superpower Competition to Integrate the Global South

Own the sensors, own the network, own the Big Data, own everything that matters

There is a virtuous circle among the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), summable as the coming Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) — the combination of AI technologies with IoT infrastructure.

The more you own such networks, the smarter you get, the better you run those networks, and the more your ownership deepens and expands with time … giving you even more networks, making you even smarter … you get the idea.

Understand: AI lives off Big Data. The more Big Data it consumes, the smarter it gets. ChatGPT and others generative engines like it have widely harvested data from the Web, setting off a storm of lawsuits from creators legitimately feeling ripped-off. AI can, on its own, also generate new data which can then be fed back into those engines for further digesting (aka, closed-loop learning).

Setting aside the Metaverse (the ever burgeoning virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users), which, as it grows, generates massive amounts of data from user interactions and connected devices, the biggest yet-to-be-tapped source of Big Data out there is the Global South now coming online as the global middle class’s geographic center of gravity.