- Artificial intelligence poses a growing risk through unchecked authority over decisions affecting employment, elections and public information.
- Kenya’s institutional and regulatory capacity has lagged behind its enthusiasm for adopting new technologies, leaving the country vulnerable to AI-driven political manipulation.
- The government should regulate high-risk AI, hold companies accountable and ensure human responsibility remains central to decisions involving life, liberty and war.
By Yabesh Onwonga
There is something profoundly arrogant about humanity: we invent a machine, give it extraordinary power, discover that we do not fully understand what it can do, and then congratulate ourselves for being clever. Artificial intelligence may be the ultimate expression of that arrogance. We are building systems capable of thinking, learning, predicting, persuading and acting at a speed no human institution can match, yet governments are behaving as though the greatest danger is that somebody might use the wrong punctuation in a chatbot.
The argument that artificial intelligence could become deadly within the next decade should not be dismissed as the hysteria of frightened scientists or technological pessimists. It should be treated as a warning, not necessarily because machines will suddenly develop hatred for humanity, but because humans are already demonstrating an extraordinary willingness to surrender responsibility to machines. We are sleepwalking into a future in which algorithms may determine who gets hired, who receives credit, what news citizens see, which people are considered dangerous and, eventually, who is targeted in war. The technology will not need emotions to cause devastation; it will only need authority. And authority is precisely what we are giving it.
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The question is how many of us will survive the next ten years
The greatest danger is not a robot marching through Nairobi with a gun. The greater danger is an invisible system sitting in a server somewhere, making thousands of decisions before the public even knows it exists. A machine can deny a person a service, destroy a reputation, manipulate an election or generate convincing falsehoods at a scale that would be impossible for human beings. By the time society discovers the damage, the damage may already be irreversible.
Kenya should be especially nervous. We are quick to celebrate ourselves as a digital nation, yet our technological enthusiasm often runs far ahead of our institutional capacity to control its consequences. We embraced mobile money and transformed commerce. We embraced social media and transformed political communication. Now AI arrives with exponentially greater power, and the question is whether our regulators, courts, schools and politicians are remotely prepared for what is coming.
Consider elections. Kenya knows better than most countries how poisonous political propaganda can become. Now give political operatives machines capable of producing millions of personalised lies, fake voices, fabricated videos and synthetic photographs. Give every voter a different version of reality. Give criminals the ability to make a politician appear to say something he never said. Give propagandists the capacity to operate twenty-four hours a day without fatigue. Then tell citizens to make an informed democratic choice. That is not democracy. That is technological warfare against the human mind.
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And the threat goes beyond politics. AI will transform employment, perhaps brutally. The young graduate who spent years acquiring qualifications may discover that an algorithm can perform part of his job faster and cheaper. The journalist may compete with machines producing thousands of articles. The designer may compete with software generating images in seconds. The call-centre worker may be replaced by a voice that never sleeps. We are repeatedly told not to worry because AI will “create new jobs.” Perhaps it will. But history is rarely kind to those who lose their livelihoods during technological revolutions. The benefits do not automatically flow to everyone; they flow first to those who own the machines, the data and the capital.
That is why the AI debate must stop being a playground for billionaires and technology enthusiasts. This is about power. Who controls the machines will increasingly control information. Who controls information can influence markets, elections and public opinion. And whoever controls those things possesses power over society itself.
So, will AI kill humanity within ten years? Perhaps not. But that is almost the wrong question. The real question is whether humanity will be reckless enough to create systems so powerful that, when something goes catastrophically wrong, nobody can stop them. If we are serious about survival, governments must regulate high-risk AI before disaster forces them to. Companies must be held accountable for what their systems do.
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Citizens must know when they are interacting with machines. Human beings must remain responsible for decisions involving life, liberty and war. Because when the machine makes the fatal decision, blaming the algorithm will not bring the dead back.
The age of artificial intelligence has arrived. The frightening part is not that the machines are becoming smarter. It is that their creators may not be becoming wiser.
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