We Are Reaching for the Stars While People Are Starving on Earth

And I can't stop thinking about it.

I grew up in Latin America. I have lived in Canada, the UK, the United States. I have sat in rooms with policymakers, economists, and executives talking about the future of energy, of markets, of technology. I have also walked streets where that future feels very, very far away.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it is my mother's voice.

She had a particular way of moving through the world - eyes open, always. She didn't let us look away from things just because they were uncomfortable. She pointed out the woman on the corner. She asked questions at the dinner table that had no easy answers. She installed something in us - a kind of awareness that I didn't always know what to do with when I was young, but that gets louder with every passing year.

Lately, it's deafening.

The most extraordinary and most unsettling moment of our lives

I work in economics. I follow macro trends for a living. I track what's happening in markets, in policy, in geopolitics. So when I say AI is moving faster than almost anything I've seen - I mean it analytically, not just as a feeling.

And it is genuinely extraordinary. I find myself in awe of it regularly. The things being built right now, the speed of it, the creativity of it - it matters. It will change everything.

But I keep coming back to a question I can't shake loose: for whom?

Because I've seen this movie before. Not personally - but professionally, historically. Every major technological revolution has told the same story. The first industrial revolution. The second. The digital age. Each time, the promise was that progress would lift everyone. And progress did come. But it came unevenly. It came for some people and not others. And the people it skipped were almost always the same people - the ones already living at the margins, the ones the systems were never really designed for in the first place.

AI is following the same arc. And we are watching it happen in real time.

What I see when I look at Latin America

I'm not speaking abstractly here. The region I know best - the one I grew up in, the one I write about and analyze every day - is one of the most unequal in the world. It always has been. And the question of who benefits from new technology is not theoretical there. It is immediate. It is personal.

There are communities in this region without reliable internet. Without consistent electricity. Without access to the kind of education that would let someone even understand what AI is, let alone use it. And while the technology gap between the Global North and the Global South is not new, AI has the potential to make it worse - faster - than anything before it.

The people best positioned to benefit are the ones who already had the most. And the ones being left behind are the ones who were already behind. I see it in the data. I feel it in my gut.

The parallel universes we're living in simultaneously

Here is what we are doing right now, all at the same time, on this one small planet:

We are sending humans back to space - which I think is important, genuinely, I believe in exploration and science and the long arc of human curiosity. And we are watching people kill each other in conflicts the world has largely learned to scroll past. And children are dying of hunger - not because there isn't enough food, but because of who has it and who doesn't. And diseases that have been taking lives for generations still don't have cures, partly because the funding follows the money, not the need. And we are continuing - knowingly, with full awareness - to degrade the only planet we actually live on, while some of the same people funding its destruction are romanticizing the idea of leaving it for another one.

I don't say this to be bleak. I say it because my mother raised me to say it out loud.

The question she put in me

What would it actually look like if the people building these technologies decided - genuinely, not as a PR move or a line in a sustainability report - that the goal was to bridge the gap instead of widen it?

What if the measure of success wasn't valuation, but access? What if the most impressive thing AI could do wasn't generate a viral image, but help a clinic in a rural part of Central America diagnose something that would otherwise go undetected? Help a first-generation university student in Costa Rica get the same quality of guidance as someone at an Ivy League school? Help a smallholder farmer in Sub-Saharan Africa make better decisions about their harvest?

It's not impossible. None of it is impossible. It's a choice. It has always been a choice.

I don't have the answers. I'm an economist, not a prophet. But I was raised by a woman who believed that noticing things - really noticing them, and refusing to look away - was the beginning of doing something about them.

So this is me, noticing.

And asking out loud: what are we actually building this for?

I'd love to know what you think - especially if you're sitting with the same questions.