The Global South is “a little bit more optimistic” about AI compared to the West thanks to differing perceptions about how the technology can benefit society, a top Google-Alphabet executive said Tuesday.
“The attitudes to AI have always been a little different,” James Manyika, the company’s senior vice president of research, labs, technology and society said at Semafor’s Next 3 Billion event. “In terms of the potential to make a difference, I think there’s always been more possibilities.”
His comments came as pushback on AI is growing in the US, particularly against data centers. While Manyika noted challenges like infrastructure and access, he pointed to Google Translate now being able to work in 300 languages — a new milestone — with “a moonshot of 1,000 languages.”
He also mentioned health breakthroughs in diagnostics: Nearly 40% of people go undiagnosed for tuberculosis — that gap is particularly concentrated in the Global South.
“So we spent a long year in Zambia and India, for example, working and showcasing that we can actually use AI to do that,” Manyika said. “These examples… are quite real. Not in some far future, but now.”
And Google’s Planetary Prediction Engine, he said, was used to predict Ebola outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with 83% accuracy.