The threat of artificial intelligence, AI

From small offices to growing businesses, many people are now using simple digital tools to make their tasks easier.[Courtesy, Freepik.com]

In the 21st Century, technology picked up speed with the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in ways that threaten humans, its creators. Starting as a tool to make work and calculations easier than before, its real threat is not so much in machines replacing humans in mechanical operations, it is in AI purporting to take over the main function that distinguishes humans from the rest of the animals: thinking.

Evidence that this attempted takeover might be succeeding is widespread in human laziness among policy makers, the judicial systems, and universities. The concern over AI’s ability to “idiotize” and control humans occupies scattered groups and individuals who raise the alarm that all is not well.

The concerned are professors, judicial officials, and even the youth. Each has a different territory of complaints about AI. A member of the Millennium age group, Neil Kiprop, engaged Nairobi philosophers on the power of AI in Africa and how it works and operates as a kind of information or data collection infrastructure. He noted that AI threatened African sovereignty mainly because it was not philosophically rooted in anything African.

AI colonises, and among the questions was whether it is possible to deconstruct AI to ensure that it becomes relevant to Africa instead of remaining a threat. Before attempting AI deconstruction, however, observed team chairman Fred Kangethe Iraki, it would be necessary to master African languages to encourage the Africanization of AI terminologies in order to avoid framing African concepts in foreign ways. This makes recasting AI in Africa necessary as part of ongoing decolonisation.

At various universities, in and out of Kenya, professors complain that students lack seriousness as they, in using AI to do the assignments, abandon common sense. In the process, critical thinking disappears, students become robotic, and miss the point of being in the university, one of them being the ability to reason. The view that universities are fundamentally communities of scholars in search of knowledge, advancing the production, and disseminating knowledge, becomes secondary to notions that students are “clients” or “customers”. The main worry for professors, therefore, is how to restore common sense in universities.

Subsequently, AI increases laxity among students who reproduce AI generated work and claim to have done the assignments. An MIT study noted that reliance on AI in essay writing led to reduced brain activity and reduced learning skills. A Carnegie Mellon University study revealed that students who relied on AI had diminishing problem-solving skills and made “less critical thinking effort.” They lose cognitive skills, which, argues Wayne Holmes of University College London, drop with the use of AI. They subsequently fail to develop the requisite skills that education should provide to learners. The AI attractions, therefore, tend to lure people to lose “common sense” and to sink deep into machine dependency.

Among the threats is the AI role in sliding critical thinking and the ability to learn basic skills at universities. This has a deleterious effect on various professions, including the Judiciary, and also breeds fear of existential human extinction. As Nobel Prize-winning Geoffrey Hinton worries about the AI system getting out of control and destroying humanity, Nobel Prize-winning Dennis Hassabis calls for an intergovernmental organ to protect the earth from AI.

After noticing that some lawyers presented AI-generated briefs in court, Kenya’s Supreme Court Justice Isaac Lenaola, in May 2025, advised lawyers and judges to “avoid AI for now”. In the US, federal courts fined lawyers for submitting fake AI created sources and also ruled that senior lawyers would be liable for junior lawyers in their firms who present shoddy AI cooked briefs in court.

Historian Yuval Noah Harari thinks of AI as a global coloniser and unrestrained “migrant” that de-borders every country. At Davos in 2026, he warned the assembled economic global mandarins that their short term focus ignored AI’s real threat to humanity.