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“How profound that mystery of the Invisible is!” says the narrator in Guy de Maupassant’s famous story — The Horla. It’s about a parasitic consciousness which leads the narrator to mistreat his servants and put his own house ablaze with fire.

We’re at a stage when we have already started seeing the big fishes in the pond gobbling up trillions while half of the under-developed and developing nations are facing unprecedented financial pressures. It is unquestionable that cause and effect are at play here. While less can be speculated about under-developed countries, developing countries are surely at the wrong side of tracks. An amazing article published at Bloomberg Opinion delineates how developing nations are just starting to suffer the worst AI could bring to their platter. It talks about how in recent decades India and China have presented to the world two different growth models — completely different financial ecosystems, the former being propelled by IT Support, and the latter by — to put straight — mass labor.

Over the same last decade, we’ve seen a huge rise in demand for technology and a rise in hoards of crowds willing to stand in long lines to catch first-hands on the latest iPhone. It is not surprising to see Amazon and Apple hitting the trillion-dollar mark. And with this spectacular dance of the stars, comes a heavy demand for craftsmanship and blue-collar IT support. For someone like me who works in IT — this demand is neither healthy nor self-supporting; it requires crowds willing to put their creative minds aside and being glued to their screens at a below-average payscale.

What’s even worse is that this same workforce is unconsciously working towards creating systems which are going to eat their own jobs. And honestly, that should ring some bells right there — Isn’t the modern, materialistic society trying to solve the very problems it’s creating?

Outsourcing eased out a lot of financial pressure on the big corporates. It hurts the American job market a little but at the same time helps bridge the gap between the rich and poor — by fostering growth in developing nations. Not to say that corporates outsource because they care about it. But AI goes one step further. Parked in Silicon Valley, it is silently eyeing the 277.47 million workers in Chinese factories which are getting paid an abysmal 300$ a month. Proponents might argue that this huge workforce can be put to work for something better — perhaps an even more advanced AI. But what they don’t realize is the common susceptibility of an uneasy situation that this game ends at. In a capitalist society, it is not only impossible, but unstable to have financial equality. AI exacerbates this by making it impossible for the bona fide highbrows — its creators, and the unskilled — or even less-fortunate workers in developing countries to even coexist.

Most college graduates in India end up in these IT support roles and feed into the system while getting paid a meager 300$ a month for their college degrees which loaded them with student loans. This very particular story of a typical college grad in India is a fine needle to thread, and dissents from the very idea of an egalitarian society.

On the contrary, it is practically unreasonable to stop working towards AI when its rewards seem so much alluring — from curing diseases, space exploration and what not. But to openly embrace its development we really need to think about the ways it might result in a much unstable society. Our governments, now more than ever, need to administer litmus tests to assess moral grounds of adopting AI and enforcing hard limits on cost-cutting by use of AI in the commercial sphere. Proper thought has to be put into this before we start realizing “The Horla” as a collective humanity.