Who is the Facebook or Instagram of this era? Which AI platforms are being deployed into children’s bedrooms, classrooms and social lives without full transparency about internal research? Which companies are already measuring how certain prompts, filters or recommendation engines affect adolescent self-image, loneliness, or compulsive use?
If Bangladesh treats artificial intelligence simply as another digital tool, it risks falling behind in a world where advantage increasingly rests on capability and commodified intelligence rather than labour alone.
From Victorian automata to today’s AI girlfriend apps, we have sought to mechanize intimacy, to distill love into algorithms. This musing traces that arc, using Joi as a lodestar to navigate the shadows of desire, capitalism, and digital isolation.
Success depends on three commitments that cannot be deferred: Speed. Visible, funded action in year one. Not plans for action. Action. Resources. Specific, budgeted commitments, not proposals
The crisis of politics is not its end, but its hollowing. The machinery we inherited was not designed to govern algorithmic power or planetary limits. Recognizing this is not defeatism but intellectual honesty.
I’m not against using AI, I never was. I just want you to use it cautiously. Because the more you are replacing AI with your own mind, the more it will take space in your soul. If we keep asking AI solutions for every simple problem, our mind will become too fragile to face challenges.
AI has and may usher in many wonderful opportunities and possibilities. But, at the same time, AI may be the last nail in the coffin of that glorious era where a broad-based social mobility achieved through higher education brought about greater economic and political equality.
AI systems don't operate in a vacuum. They operate on people and amplify the society beneath them. That brings us to the uncomfortable question at the heart of Bangladesh's AI future: if we deploy these systems on top of our existing inequalities, do we fix them or automate them?
A policy without execution mechanisms is not a plan. It is a press release.
Bangladesh needs to protect itself and its intellectual property in the age of artificial intelligence. Do our leaders and decision-makers understand what is at stake?
We are already behind, but it is not too late and it need not continue to be that way. AI can help Bangladesh take a quantum leap into the future.
