AI vs. Africa

Health for All, or Jobs for None?

Mar 05, 2026

1 The Difference

Developing countries with fast growing, young populations and high unemployment, have different priorities from other countries.

Africa, for example, is not trying to solve the same problems the west is trying to solve.

As the world hurtles, brakes off, into the wild, uncharted abyss of artificial intelligence, Africa appears to be letting itself get dragged along.

The same way we were passive bystanders in previous Industrial Revolutions.

Our reaction is to mimic every step. Hold our own AI talk shops.

But, must we copy everything? Does everything that is designed by others, for others, also serve us?

2 Think first

Think. Original thought is the first law of Artificial Intelligence. If we don’t have our own plans or ideas, AI will work against us. The same way previous industrial revolutions profited the west, while still exploiting global south resources.

Why on earth do we expect this time to be different? What on earth are we doing differently?

We have come a long way from the beginning of time, when different cultures across Africa used original intelligence to solve problems. We are now swept up in a modern phenomenon where intelligence is being used to create brand new problems.

Tell me. Who needs unemployment?

Who needs the new dystopian future, the alarmist scenarios precipitated by headless, heedless threats of “the looming singularity”? And, who even decides these sorts of bizarre destinations, on our behalf?

3 Our AI

Artificial intelligence is often described as unprecedented, and fully western. But indigenous African knowledge systems pioneered its underlying logic.

Binary code.

Probabilistic reasoning.

Decision-making mathematical models.

Boolean algebra.

Memory computation.

Ifá, a Yoruba knowledge corpus has used binary code to generate predictive insights for over 8,000 years. Researchers like Olu Longe & Ron Eglash have traced a conceptual lineage from African binary systems through Arab geomancy and European alchemy to the work of Gottfried Leibniz, the 17th-century mathematician nowadays credited with formalising binary logic.

But, the version of predictive and generative intelligence made by the west has a different trajectory from all its predecessors. A devastating future event called the Singularity is predicted to be around the corner. Some say we are already in it.

It is the barely perceptible moment when machines surpass human intelligence and no longer need to be told what to do. When this point is reached, it will upend human life as we know it, causing rapid, uncontrollable, and irreversible changes to civilization.

Easy to predict: secretary type jobs, analytical roles or even manual labor, will disappear. Isn’t that 90% of what constitutes modern work? Those of us in healthcare jobs are told to prepare for a future where we are no longer the apex professionals, as we have been for hundreds of years.

This is where I differ.

4 Culture of Care

Living in Europe for 2 decades and counting, I have observed their culture of medical practice. It is good in many ways, deleterious in a few.

As a theoretical and clinical subject, there is nothing happening in western medicine that is not happening in the hospitals and medical schools where I was trained in Africa, sometimes even better. Western medicine does have a definite technological and research edge. But this is nothing better distribution of capital cannot solve. There is certainly not an innate human superiority in western medicine, despite centuries of fallacious race science and global health propaganda.

My point is, the arts of medicine and nursing, as practiced in the west, are slightly different, in the cultural context, from the more classical, more clinically oriented, more hands on, much more interpersonal healthcare culture in countries like Nigeria or Ghana.

And, I hope things stay that way.

I am alarmed that a time comes when African nurses and doctors become as impersonal and secretary-like as those I’ve seen in Europe.

It appears inevitable, given the acceleration of capitalism’s pressures, and our shortages of staffing, and growing populations. Conditions that respond well to algorithmic resource management and time efficiency: and what does AI do, if not analytical and algorithmic work?

In this sense, AI will take over.

But, this kind of human-absent medical care is also why the breakdown of social, community and mental health is accelerating across the west.

5 Stand Your Ground

In an alternative scenario, where African health systems place more value on our own indigenous cultures of care, and reject the replacement of the human interface by machines and algorithms, the AI replacement will never happen.

Yes, parts of our job will be taken over.

The note taking, analysis, diagnoses and manual surgical parts.

But, is that what makes a doctor, or a nurse? I certainly hope not.

In a viral 2026 essay on the looming AI-pocalypse, titled “something big is happening”, Matt Shumer, predicts: “AI is now building AI…exceeding human performance in… medical analysis, reading scans, lab results, suggesting diagnoses, reviewing literature,”

Earlier this year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei prophesied “Within 1 to 5 years, AI could replace 50% of white-collar jobs. AI is coming for cognitive labor. All of it.”

He may be right. Except that real medicine is not just ‘cognitive labor’. It is emotional and human and physical, and most importantly, cultural. What works in the west as care, may actually exacerbate disease for someone raised with higher social standards and critical expectations regarding care.

However, when money is the chief metric for healthcare, and time is as scarce as it can be under capitalism, the stranglehold of AI on healthcare grows stronger.

That is why I’m calling for a medicine and nursing that upholds not just our Hippocratic commitment, but harks back to the traditions of Imhotep, Osanyin, and every Dibia, Sangoma, Babalawo and community nursing systems that predate the capitalist mode of medicine today.

Over the din of profit and privatization, can we choose to continue to prioritize models of care as human presence , connection and communication, over and above factory-floor modes of ‘efficiency’, time saving , and profits?

Or is that too much to ask?

6 Ideology of AI

These predicted AI singularity type outcomes will vary by culture.

Cultures where the human alternative is weak, such as the west, will go extinct.

Africa, where we function more on human-to-human connection should at least have more time to contemplate this path. I quote economist Jason Hickel when he says, “poor countries are poor because they are integrated into the global economic system on unequal terms, and aid only helps to hide this.” I quote this to point out that Africa is locked at the hip to the West, and this, not on terms favorable to us. And that, while the economic yoke is apparent, the forced mental colonialism is often debated.

Therefore, Africa’s professions, such as law, accounting, medicine, and so on, are all modeled as closely as possible to the west. In that way, we expect that whichever way the west goes, as far as technology adoption, Africa is bound to go. We will copy the ideas, but they will keep the profits. That’s the way the world has always been.

But must it be that way to the end? Why do we have a proverb about the fly that follows the deceased body into the grave? The west is going down fighting, and attempting to take everybody down with it – must we follow, or can we for the first time, outthink them, and center ourselves?

7 AI is Capitalism on Steroids

Important, if Africa and global south make the radical choice to decolonize and delink our Markets, policies and worldviews from Western led models, we might maybe escape the imposition of an AI dominant future.

The west developed AI to solve a problem they have, and as a strategy to build a future they are desperate for. AI’s ultimate goal is to defund, devalue and demonetize human labor.

Think of it as a historical progression from feudalism to slavery to colonization to neocolonialism and globalization and capitalism and finally artificial intelligence.

In each of these steps, labor is cheapened until the cost drops to zero and falls through the floor. Step by step, capital is accumulated completely until all of it belongs to the 1 percent at the top and the masses own nothing. Remember this is an actual quote popularized by that infamous gathering of untouchable elites, the World Economic Forum: “In the future you will own nothing and you will be happy”.

Capitalism was the beast that perfected this centuries long process, and AI is really just end stage capitalism.

No coincidence that AI coincides with the death throes of empire, unfolding in real time as Trump bares the imperial core’s true fangs, with tariffs and bombs going off ad nauseam.

The trick is to present AI as the ultimate technology when all it really is is the ultimate market tool, the ultimate capitalism, the veritable 5th Industrial Revolution.

As the 1st & 2nd revolutions were rooted in enslavement & colonization of the global south, especially Africa, the 3rd & 4th are based on dehumanization, illicit extraction and capital violence. This final Industrial Revolution will be at its heart, still unethical, immoral and antihuman.

8 AI for Good

Of course mainstream narratives will avoid this, and instead present AI as a technological revolution. History has always been best understood only in hindsight. But you don’t have to be like that. You can understand it before it happens. That’s why we study, and refuse to be drowned in matrix hoopla.

The coming implosion can hardly be resisted or controlled by individuals, but if the global south as a group, and in particular Africa as one collective, the source of the industrial minerals that power modern technology, can stand its ground, delink itself and unintegrate its economies and politics, from centuries-long exploitation and unequal positioning within the extractive global order, there’s a glimmer of a chance the west will die alone, and the rest of us will be saved from this latest Anthropocene, this end time extinction, this final apocalypse disguised as technological singularity.

Listen. All of this fatalism, the apocalyptic scenarios and human-deleting use cases of AI are by deliberate design. Other choices could’ve been made.

Instead of endless new wars, maybe AI for world peace?

Instead of homeless people on the streets of New York and Amsterdam, maybe affordable housing?

Instead of millions dying of curable and potentially eradicable diseases, maybe AI for good health?

What happened to our post-WWII mantra, Health for All?

AI could have solved not only the scientific basis, but also the governance necessary to distribute #UniversalHealthCoverage.

But we are here. In that other universe where nobody gives a fadoodle about who lives, or a floccinaucinihilipilification about who dies.

In spite of AI, our modern lives are infrequently mired in tight time schedules and daily traffic: the associated cortisol-spiked stress-related, chronic diseases cost the US economy $4.4 trillion, or (90%) of the nation’s total annual healthcare spending.

Think about it, instead of maddening traffic and overstretched, inefficient public transport, what about a new age of AI for fast and efficient public transportation systems?

Instead of eleventh-hour climate crisis, how about AI solutions to our various environmental catastrophes, all driven by unmitigated capitalism?

Do we need more war, and more digital spying, or on the other hand, maybe, the ability to have our needs met without spending all our time at work? How about care for the disabled and elderly?

But a system driven by the endless pursuit of profit only makes human life worse, AI or no.

AI could have served human needs on a global scale, at a faster rate than we’ve ever seen.

But, capitalism: the goal of which has never been to make anything better, but everything cheaper for the capitalist overlords.

So, AI will continue to fulfill all the most toxic traits of capitalism, but finally remove the last shreds of any possible accountability, as human interface is rendered redundant by the sovereign will of a very few super-elite, who will remain beyond the veil, and who will be exempt from total surrender and utter subjugation to the coming Anthropocene.