Dear Editor,
The irony could not be starker.
Across leading universities, the very programmes best equipped to examine the social, ethical, and political consequences of artificial intelligence are being defunded, even as those same institutions actively promote the widespread use of AI tools in classrooms, administration, and research. This is not innovation. It is institutional auto-cannibalism, someone said.
What this moment exposes is a deeper and more unsettling truth: AI is not merely a future threat to humanity, it is already reshaping the conditions under which we think, imagine, decide, and act.
And it is doing so not as an enemy, but as a helper.
Much of the public debate still imagines AI as an external danger: a rogue intelligence, a system that escapes human control, a familiar science-fiction apocalypse. Those visions are misleading. The more serious threat today is internal. It lies in how AI integrates itself into everyday life under the language of efficiency, productivity, and optimization, and in doing so, quietly displaces human judgment, ethical reasoning, and independent imagination.
We can see this clearly in concrete ways. In education systems worldwide, AI tools now answer student queries, automate grading, draft feedback, and manage administrative decisions. In medicine, automated systems transcribe consultations, summarize diagnoses, and assist in treatment planning. In business and government, AI increasingly informs forecasting, policy modelling, risk assessment, and resource allocation.
These systems undeniably improve output and speed. But they also relocate memory, reasoning, and decision-making away from humans and into opaque technical systems.
This is not a development we can meaningfully “resist.” Resistance assumes an external force that can be kept at bay. That moment has passed. AI is no longer outside us. It has insinuated itself into our calculations, our projections, our expectations — and increasingly into our imagination. The real issue is not whether AI will be part of our lives, but whether we are conscious of what is happening to us as it becomes so.
This is the deeper paradox of our time: the more effective and “good” AI becomes, the more dangerous it is, not because it turns against us, but because it turns into a partner. It helps us do things better, faster, and more efficiently, while slowly eroding the very human capacities required to question, challenge, and govern it.
Scholars in AI ethics have described this process as moral deskilling and institutional dependency, a condition in which societies adopt powerful technologies faster than they develop the ethical, cultural, and democratic frameworks needed to live with them. Human agency does not collapse dramatically; it thins out gradually.
For Guyana, this matters profoundly. As we pursue digital transformation and position ourselves within the global Orange Economy, where creativity, culture, and imagination are central assets, we must ask difficult questions. Are we strengthening the spaces of independent thought and cultural imagination, or are we allowing them to be quietly colonized by metrics of efficiency and output?
This concern is not new to postcolonial thought. Writers such as Wilson Harris warned against what might be called colonial realism, a linear, instrumental view of progress that reduces human experience to function, productivity, and control. Harris insisted on non-linear consciousness, on interior spaces of imagination that allow societies to escape imposed realities and reinvent themselves.
The danger in the AI age is that those interior spaces, the very spaces that made cultural liberation possible, would be lost again, not through overt domination, but through convenience.
When imagination itself becomes optimized, assisted, predicted, and automated, we are entering a new form of enclosure, one that embraces us and feels helpful rather than oppressive.
We are moving toward this condition in which humanity exists somewhere between science and fiction, between human judgement and machine mediation. Today this integration is largely software. Tomorrow it will be hardware: wearables, augmented reality, neural interfaces. Smart watches and glasses are only the early signals. Deeper integrations are already being designed.
This essay is not an argument against AI. It is an argument for awareness. We must learn to recognize AI not as something “out there” to be feared or resisted, but as something that is reshaping who we are becoming. The task before us is not to stop this process, that is neither realistic nor desirable, but to see it clearly, to name its implications, and to preserve spaces of agency, imagination, ethics, and human judgement within it.
If we dismantle the institutions and disciplines that think critically about technology while celebrating the technology itself, we do not advance. We regress: quietly, efficiently, and with great enthusiasm.
That is the paradox of both our present and our future. And Guyana would do well to learn about it early, thoughtfully, and honestly.