The Moment We Started Asking the Wrong Questions
Not long ago, someone me asked a question that sounded inevitable: Will AI replace us? It is a question that I have been asked many time before. Most of the time, the question is asked from a lack of knowledge, other times it comes from a place of fear.
I submit that it is the wrong question to be asking. In my view, the more urgent one is this: What should we give up to machines — and what must remain human, no matter how advanced the technology becomes?
Across Africa and the world, AI has slipped quietly into daily life. It recommends what we watch, finishes our sentences, helps us learn, work, shop, diagnose, design, and decide. It is no longer an abstract future. It is already shaping the present.
And like every powerful tool before it, AI is accelerating our capacity to act — without automatically improving our capacity to choose wisely.
Where AI Is Already Helping Us Move Faster
AI excels at removing friction. That alone makes it transformative.
In classrooms, AI-driven tools are personalizing learning for students who once fell through rigid systems. In hospitals, pattern recognition is assisting early diagnosis where specialists are scarce. In agriculture, AI models are helping farmers anticipate weather shifts, manage risk, and increase yields. In finance and commerce, it is expanding access, detecting fraud, and streamlining transactions.
Across industries, AI is compressing timelines. What once took weeks now takes days. What took days now takes hours. In societies where resources are stretched and needs are urgent, this acceleration matters.
AI also democratizes entry. A young entrepreneur with a laptop can design, code, market, and distribute products that once required entire teams. A small business can compete with scale. A learner can access tutors, explanations, and simulations once locked behind elite institutions.
This is innovation at speed and at scale — and it is real.
But Speed Is Not the Same as Progress
There is a temptation, especially in fast-moving societies, to equate speed with advancement. The history of man would firmly suggest otherwise.
AI produces outputs quickly, but does it understand outcomes? It predicts based on patterns, but can it do the same based on values? It optimizes for efficiency, not fairness. It offers answers without carrying responsibility for their consequences.
This distinction matters deeply.
When AI is used to recommend credit, medical treatment, hiring decisions, or public policy interventions, it can reinforce existing inequalities if not moderated by human judgement. When it curates information, it can amplify misinformation just as easily as truth. When it shapes social interaction, it can deepen isolation even as it increases connection.
AI does not know when something is unjust. It only knows what is statistically likely.
The Innovation AI Enables — and the Judgment It Lacks
There is no question that AI will help us innovate faster.
It will accelerate scientific discovery, optimize energy systems, strengthen climate modelling, and improve public service delivery. It will help cities run better, markets function more efficiently, and institutions respond more quickly.
But innovation without judgment is not progress. It is momentum without direction.
AI cannot decide what a society should prioritize. It cannot weigh dignity against efficiency. It cannot understand why certain trade-offs are unacceptable, even if they are technically optimal.
Those decisions require ethics, memory, culture, and empathy — qualities shaped by human experience, not data alone.
What We Must Not Abdicate
There are domains we must be especially careful not to outsource.
We must not outsource moral responsibility. When systems fail or harm occurs, accountability cannot be assigned to an algorithm. Responsibility belongs to people — designers, deployers, leaders, and institutions.
We must not outsource critical thinking. AI’s fluency can create the illusion of authority. Societies that stop questioning automated outputs risk becoming passive consumers of decisions they no longer understand.
We must not outsource human connection. Care, trust, leadership, and solidarity are built through presence, vulnerability, and shared experience. No machine can replicate this, no matter how convincing its tone.
And we must not outsource purpose. AI can help us achieve goals more efficiently, but it cannot tell us which goals are worth pursuing in the first place.
The Real Risk Isn’t Technology — It’s Abdication
Every major technological shift has forced societies to confront the same tension: capability versus wisdom.
From Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press flowed knowledge but also propaganda. Industrialization created prosperity and exploitation. Digital platforms have connected the world but also fragmented it. It is likely that AI will follow this pattern. For better and for worse, it will magnify human intention, not replace it.
The danger is not that AI will become too powerful. The danger is that we will stop exercising judgment because the system appears to work. When efficiency becomes the highest value, humanity is often the first casualty.
A Better Question for the Age of AI
The future does not belong to societies that reject AI, nor to those that surrender decision-making to it entirely. It belongs to societies that are clear-eyed.
Clear about where AI can accelerate learning, discovery, and opportunity. Clear about where human judgment, ethics, and leadership must remain firmly in place. AI should help us see further, move faster, and work smarter. But it should never decide what kind of society we are trying to build.
That responsibility — heavy, complex, difficult and unavoidable — remains ours. We should never outsource it. And perhaps that is the most important thing to remember as we race toward an AI-powered future: technology can expand our capabilities, but only humanity can define our direction.
