Mustafa Suleyman stood before Financial Times readers recently to deliver a prophecy. The Microsoft leader declared that office professionals would find their work automated in eighteen months. Such warnings matched words from other tech leaders who paint a dark image of an approaching economic storm.
At Anthropic, Mrinank Sharma, a senior AI safety researcher, resigned to study poetry as he feared for the world. Meanwhile, Elon Musk told attendees at Davos that robots will outnumber people as space computing becomes affordable.
The pronouncements share a common blind spot. They assume a world of perfect English contracts and Western business customs.
The belief collapses as it hits the ground in the actual world. Stanford researchers found that English-only AI tools worsen healthcare access in some places. Many popular languages receive only scraps of data. Swahili is spoken by 200 million people but lacks the digital records that code needs.
Only a fifth of the population speaks English but AI treats the language as the main way to work. Very few of the world 7,000 languages appear in digital files. UNESCO estimates that only 400 languages work well online. The rest are invisible to software.
The World Silicon Valley Overlooks
The language gap breaks the automation account. Mumbai lawyers use old terms that do not fit Western rules. Accountants in Brazil use tax codes with no English match. In Lagos, managers run teams through WhatsApp in local ways. Marketers in Jakarta use slang that software cannot read.
The tools built for automation perform poorly on tasks that do not match their training. Code falters on new types of information. Researchers uncovered that AI caused a 20 per cent productivity drag for developers. Tasks that need local wisdom stay outside the current reach of software.
The Assistant Economy
Staff at big tech firms already use AI to help with code because they have vast resources. The firms hire from top schools and use computers that average shops cannot obtain. The tools need conditions that small businesses in Bangalore lack. They need steady power and set formats. Even with the perks, the job cuts in 2025 were a small part of the market.
A 2025 report uncovered that lawyers use AI for small tasks like scanning papers. Gains were tiny. Researchers uncovered that big tech profits grew as the rest of the market stayed the same. The wins stay inside the tech world for now.
The Geography of Code
The ideas about space computing face sizeable hurdles. The dream of cheap servers in orbit assumes that rockets will cost very little to launch. Experts calculated that the centres are twenty years away. Hardware in space needs robots that do not exist yet.
The cost of bringing AI to diverse places is often ignored. A healthcare tool in Rwanda achieved 71 per cent accuracy. The score leaves a wide margin for errors. The country employs 70,000 workers who speak many different languages. Building tools for them takes funding that Silicon Valley does not spend.
The Missing Human Element
The eighteen-month window ignores how technology actually moves. History suggests as much because developers using AI took 19 per cent longer to finish their work. The gap between what people thought and the actual results was large. Developers thought they were faster even as they were slower.
The contradictions expose a flaw in the promises. Leaders mistake a demo for a finished tool. They think a test score is the same as being useful in life. A poll uncovered that developers are looking at new AI but they are far from using it for real.
The Approaching Change
The 78 million new positions predicted by 2030 point to a change in the market. Employers plan to hire staff with new skills. Human writing might gain a higher value as machines flood the web. Using many languages plays a part in keeping culture alive.
Silicon Valley sells a dream of global automation although building for English markets. A gap sits between the dream and the world. Workers in Hanoi or Nairobi deal with tasks that software does not get.
Many complex jobs are safer than headlines say. AI will help people who have local wisdom. Software serves people who already held advantages. Others wait for code that understands their life. The wait will last for a long time.
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