The Screen Economy and Data Chains

We are in the twilight of human intellectual supremacy.  The Screen Economy will chaperone an age of unconstrained flourishing of artificial life, the likes of which humans have never witnessed before. It will foment the most profound identity crisis that humanity has ever faced, with AI meshworks increasingly matching and exceeding our cognitive abilities.

Brazil, Uruguay and Chile are Latin American forerunners in the Screen Economy with huge capital injections, nurturing R&D, and assimilating AI into public and private services. Brazil has initiated a multi-billion-dollar AI plan. Chile is focusing on green AI, and Uruguay is shining in digital talent and AI architectures.  The paradox of the Screen Economy in Latin America is characterised by high consumption and low investment. Latin America is one of the largest consumers of generative AI, but, it is a region that invests the least in this technology.

Reports from ECLAC and Chile’s National Centre for Artificial Intelligence illustrate that no country in the region exceeds the global average for AI investment as a percentage of GDP per capita, and the regional average is six times lower than that investment average. Latin America accounts for 6.6% of global GDP and 8.8% of the population. The third-largest market worldwide for generative AI application downloads is Latin America. However, it accounts for only 1.12% of global investment in AI.

How then, do we capture the adoption frenzy and use AI as a good for economic development in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)?  How do we create better conditions for adoption and nurture the development of indigenous AI systems? How can we spur the necessary conditions for AI-led economic development?

As the creators and owners grapple with regulatory simplifications to improve economic competitiveness, a good starting point in LAC could be to address weak architectures, and the use of sensors sprinkled everywhere like confetti to gather the data crumbs. In this way we have a chance to build AI systems for different uses in different sectors of the economic ecology in each country in LAC. How can we exploit new AI-business models in LAC for profitability and competitiveness?

The wealth of nations will now be amassed in Screen Economies. Moribund company models must open themselves to the disruption of AI to have economic impact. Only when we see that data is a public good, and understand the value created by data, that we will embrace the tools to capture, refine and curate data chains, establish data lakes, and finance the establishment of national data libraries and data centres.

The AI zeitgeist is one of intensifying rivalry in the midst of the imperative to establish shared AI baselines. The bare truth is; it is possible that the speed of the AI advance will change what it is to be human. The network is ready. Is the human prepared? Is the business model AI-driven?

AI-driven business models integrate artificial intelligence into core operations and strategies to create, deliver, and capture value in novel ways. Unlike traditional models that use AI as a mere tool, these models fundamentally leverage AI for automation, data-driven decision-making, and hyper-personalisation to achieve a competitive advantage.

2026, will feature everything from social media bans to semiconductor export controls. Technological distrust has nurtured suspicion among major powers as countries become increasingly wary of overreliance on foreign technology. Countries have entered a new phase of strategic competition over AI and the architecture that powers it.

This competition is characterised by rising trade barriers, competing AI ambitions, and a mad scramble to secure control over the infosphere tools of the future. These technological power struggles are easily understood by unravelling La Fontaine’s fable “Le Loup et l’Agneau”, where a wolf and a lamb drink water at a stream.

At the watercourse of AI geopolitics, the lamb positions itself downstream of the wolf so as not to offend the stronger creature by muddying His drink. However, after a “Summit” where who has what liberty and power was deliberated over many days, the wolf carries the lamb off into the forest and eats it, without any form of “process”. The reason of the stronger is always supreme.

Living by this proposition, is to play a dangerous game, for the wolf must then always be the best. However, it is possible for the shepherd with his hounds to come looking for the lost lamb (to upstream the wolf), and then the wolf becomes the object eaten, not the one eating.

When extended to AI, the fable offers implications regarding ethical responsibility, and the nature of intelligence itself. “Le Loup et l’Agneau” highlights that in a power imbalance, the dominant party sets the rules, and reason is often a mere pretence for an underlying, irreversible, one-way relationship of consumption.