Dear Editor,
Guyana is digitising public services, expanding telecom infrastructure, deploying biometric systems, experimenting with smart city technologies and introducing satellite connectivity across hinterland and coastal regions.
In previous letters published in the Kaieteur News and the Stabroek News it has already been argued that artificial intelligence is quietly taking control of everyday life in Guyana through automated loan approvals, facial recognition in public spaces, algorithmic profiling of citizens and predictive systems that increasingly influence who receives services and who is excluded.[1]
Those letters warned that these systems are being introduced without public debate, without legislative scrutiny and without a national framework defining who owns the data, who audits the algorithms and who is accountable when errors occur.
Guyana is not merely adopting new tools, it is importing decision making systems whose internal logic even their creators struggle to interpret. When such systems become embedded in government administration, policing, border control, taxation and telecommunications, the risk is that we construct a digital state operating at speeds and complexities beyond meaningful democratic oversight.
In a society still grappling with inequality, weak regulatory culture and heavy technological dependency, this threatens to displace human judgment with opaque automation and to convert citizens into data objects managed by systems they neither see nor understand.
Guyana must therefore elevate artificial intelligence from a technical matter to a constitutional and cultural issue. If we do not begin now to debate control, alignment, transparency and sovereignty in the digital age, we will not simply modernise, we will surrender our capacity to shape the future we are building.