A few years ago, the idea would have sounded absurd. A software engineer in Lagos opens his laptop one morning and discovers that one of the world's most powerful artificial intelligence systems is no longer available to him. Not because he lacks the money to pay for it. Not because the technology itself has failed. But because of where he lives and the passport he carries.
For most of the digital age, such a scenario belonged to the realm of fantasy. Technologies could be expensive. They could be unevenly distributed. Yet the underlying ass
