Recently, a Cabinet Secretary was quoted saying that Artificial Intelligence has reduced the number of workers in the banking sector, and told Kenyans to realign with the new job market.
That coming from a government official is unfortunate, for it is the mandate of any functional government to protect its workers by putting the right legislation in place to safeguard against massive disruptions to the economy.
That we embrace every technological innovation of the day without considering its dark side or exploring measures we can put in place to protect both jobs and livelihoods could be our undoing.
We are happy to be lauded as a Silicon Savannah given how exposed or tech savvy many Kenyan youth are, but we don't seem bothered by the possibility that what we are embracing blindly could lead to our downfall.
No matter how smart any invention seems, its dark side should be considered too. Here is how AI could jeopardise careers, lives, and livelihoods.
Stories abound of religious leaders turning to AI to generate the sermons of the day. The same holds for students, as many of them now submit assignments they didn’t work on and rely on bots to do the bulk of their research.
The challenge is that if these preachers or students are asked a question related to their sermons or academic work, they are often too dumb to defend their points.
In some countries, before students are awarded any marks for tests, lecturers use fact-checkers to confirm if the work was genuine or machine-generated.
Many Kenyans chat with bots whenever they are bored or struggling with life challenges. But these bots aren't trained in everything, much less in empathy.
At this point, many chatbots are still under development, but at some point, they will be decades ahead of human intelligence, capable of managing your emotions or answering in a way to make you feel good, even if they're lying.
Remember, they have no emotions or feelings, but are reading yours and managing you. Don't be surprised when they one day go out of control, bypass human input and write their own code.
AI can also be weaponised. Lone hackers have wreaked so much havoc across the world. Now imagine fleets of autonomous bots bringing down power grids, crippling refineries, or paralysing government services remotely.
The sci-fi nightmare of humanoid machines armed not with bullets but with lethal energy weapons may sound fantastical—until the battlefield proves otherwise.
Russia and Ukraine’s use of suicidal drones shows how quickly cutting-edge tools can rewrite warfare, striking infrastructure with devastating effect.
Now imagine militaries deploying humanoid systems launched from capsules or hypersonic unmanned vehicles that strike cities and vanish without a trace.
We may be sleepwalking toward a future of AI-enabled terror—one in which both state actors and terrorists could employ these tools at scale – unless we urgently develop new policy, oversight, and international norms.
For millions of workers, artificial intelligence comes with a chilling cost – jobs are vanishing at a pace few imagined possible. From call centres to copywriting desks, machines are learning to do in seconds what humans once spent hours perfecting.
Banks are experimenting with AI-driven advisers, factories are turning to robotic process automation, and even law firms are outsourcing research to algorithms that never sleep. The wave of newsroom layoffs is just another example.
The result is a seismic shift in employment, where efficiency is prized over experience.
New roles, if they come at all, are fewer, more specialised, and out of reach for the very workers being left behind.
Economists warn that while new roles will emerge, they will not match the scale or accessibility of the jobs disappearing, leaving a growing number of people facing the harsh reality of being replaced not by another human, but by a line of code.
