08/06/2026
One question keeps surfacing in Rohit Talwar's conversations across Asia, the Middle East, and beyond: who is the AI future actually for?
The dominant narrative promises abundance - robots at near-zero cost, universal income, infinite leisure to pursue purpose and creativity. It is a coherent vision. But it was built by a specific group of technologists and investors, from a very particular cultural and economic starting point.
Spend time on the streets of Malaysia, Hong Kong, or mainland China - or large parts of Africa, South Asia, or Latin America - and you meet populations with a different foundation. People raised on the idea that you learn, you earn, and you take responsibility for yourself and those around you. Work carries identity, not just income. Automating it away is not, for most of them, a promise. It is a loss.
For these populations, the prospect of a technology created by people they have never met determining how much they receive, under what conditions, and what social role they occupy is not liberation. It is dispossession - even if a well-funded one.
AI workforce strategy that ignores this cultural and psychological reality will not just underperform. It will generate resistance, backlash, and political instability that no roadmap has priced in. The question leaders need to be sitting with is whether the people designing this transformation have genuinely reckoned with the societies they are reshaping - or whether they are still mostly talking to each other.
