PIOJ must move beyond warning about AI 

THE EDITOR, Madam:

The recent warning by the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) regarding the disruptive impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on Jamaica’s workforce is important. However, if the PIOJ is to fulfill its mandate as a principal strategic planning institution, it must begin articulating a coherent civilisational response to the AI era.

Artificial intelligence is restructuring the meaning of work, expertise, productivity, and institutional value itself.

The PIOJ now correctly acknowledges that AI increasingly reaches into the cognitive professions once considered secure — clerical administration, accounting, legal drafting, actuarial analysis, customer service, education, and even segments of healthcare.

This presents a profound challenge because much of our post-1990 economic strategy depended heavily upon service-sector expansion, outsourcing, and credential-based administrative labour. Entire pathways of upward mobility were built around office work, certification, and procedural knowledge. Ironically, those very sectors are now among the most vulnerable to AI-driven disruption.

Yet, the deeper issue is philosophical and institutional.

AI exposes a weakness already embedded within many modern educational and economic systems: too many persons were trained to become functionally efficient rather than deeply adaptive, creative, ethical, relational, or interdisciplinary. Machines excel precisely where human labour has been reduced to predictable patterns. Where work becomes procedural, AI becomes competitive.

The PIOJ’s responsibility must now extend beyond economic forecasting and labour statistics. Jamaica requires a national developmental philosophy for the AI age.

Such a framework should include:

• ethical AI governance;
• educational transformation;
• psychological resilience;
• protection against technological inequality;
• cultural and creative industry expansion;
• emotional and relational intelligence development;
• and serious examination of what constitutes meaningful human contribution in an increasingly automated society.

The danger is that Jamaica may respond to AI only through narrow ‘skills training’ initiatives while ignoring the larger social transformation underway. Coding and digital literacy programmes alone will not solve a crisis in which machines increasingly replicate cognitive functions once associated with human expertise.

The AI revolution may require an equally serious rethinking of national life.

The PIOJ, therefore, has an opportunity not merely to warn about AI, but to help lead the country toward a distinctly human-centred developmental model — one rooted not only in productivity, but also in creativity, ethics, resilience, and human flourishing.

DUDLEY MCLEAN II 

dm15094@gmail.com