Who Owns Intelligence provides an evocative insight into the practices the AI industry deploys to create and extract value from the Global South while retaining much of the resulting economic and technological value elsewhere. It proposes working alternatives with pragmatic solutions for parity of efficacy and parity of conditions to address deep-rooted harms.
The book features detailed composite case studies from Kenya, Nigeria, India, and the Philippines, following people whose data, labor, and professional expertise help make AI solutions and products possible, but whose contributions, returns, and even existence are little known outside of academic and journalism research circles. These include a Lagos oncologist whose hospital's AI diagnostic platform was never validated on local patients, a Kenyan farmer whose farm’s data enabled an intelligent harvest prediction model, a Manila content moderator whose labor contributed to a major platform's public claims about AI safety, and a Nigerian patient whose medical records funded international research. The exploration of each experience draws on documented reporting, litigation, and regulatory records, and unearths the same extraction pattern. The book poses key policy questions and seeks answers from the global AI industry, governments, and regulators, demanding they bridge the gap and reduce inequalities through data transparency, population-specific validation, benefit-sharing, and supply-chain accountability, among other measures.
Who Owns Intelligence is for practitioners, policymakers, and regulators shaping AI governance frameworks, as well as scholars and students with interest in the growth of AI and its outsized impact. The book assumes little to no technical expertise and explains AI extraction in simple language to engage readers of all backgrounds.