tephen Hawking, the renowned scientist, said: “If a superior alien civilisation sent us a text message saying, ‘We’ll arrive in a few decades,’ would we just reply, ‘Ok, call us when you get here, we’ll leave the lights on.’ Probably not, but this is more or less what has happened with artificial intelligence.”

Hawking wrote the lines when the AI had yet to make a major breakthrough. The development of computers has followed Moore’s Law which states that these machines double their memory and speed every eighteen months. The result is that computers have overtaken humans in several ways. Some of the artificial intelligence tools are now demonstrably better than humans at several design activities. Some can recursively improve their performance without human intervention.

Some Pakistanis apparently find solace in the view that the developments in the AI represent challenges in terms of unemployment for the developed world and not for less advanced countries like Pakistan. This understanding of the situation is erroneous and the conclusion misplaced.

Pakistan has a burgeoning population and a weak education system. Its young workers will be among the first to be affected by the AI juggernaut.

Pakistan’s current population growth rate of 2.55 per cent is greater than both India and China. Its population is projected to reach 403 million by 2050. This presents an alarming situation given its low economic growth rate and the failure on the part of successive governments to introduce structural changes in economy, education and governance.

The unemployment ratio in the country today is 8 per cent; the poverty rate is around 40 per cent. According to the United Nations Development Programme, Pakistan has the highest proportion of young population. Almost 64 per cent of the population is below the age of 30. There is an immense opportunity to transform the huge number of young people into high quality human resource and reap rich socio-economic dividends. Conversely, the enormous youth population can be an unbearable burden.

The AI is set to make many of the present-day professions redundant. The corporate world has already turned its gaze to maximising efficiency and profits by employing AI tools in industries as well as services. In addition to efficiency, the AI tools are free of human failings.

To cope with the emerging predicament, Pakistan needs to revamp its education system and be in tune with the requirements of the future. We need to realign our education system along creative lines to hone creative, collaborative, communicative and critical thinking skills. Rote learning and reproduction of the same material on paper, which currently define the Pakistani education system, will not work.

To cope with the emerging predicament, Pakistan needs to revamp its education system and be in tune with the requirements of the upcoming times. We need to realign our education along creative lines to hone creative, collaborative, communicative and critical thinking skills. 

Bringing about the required changes at the school and college levels requires commitment, will, and capacity on the part of policy makers.

Policy making for higher education in Pakistan is currently the prerogative of the Higher Education Commission, which appears singularly deficient in vision and creativity needed to come up with creative solutions in the age of AI.

In 2017, the HEC prepared a document, Vision 2025, “which lays bare its cluelessness about higher education underscored by an unbridled flight of imagination and hollowness of argument,” writes Dr Mohammad Waseem, a leading social scientist. Vision 2025 proposed to redesign thirty universities in the top tier of its three-tiered model of tertiary education “to serve as global centres of trans-disciplinary scholarship.” It failed to transform even a single institution.

Higher education, the document said, was the engine of socio-economic development of Pakistan along with equitable access and a culture of research. Nevertheless, the goal of equitable access does not seem to have been pursued at all. There has never been so much inequitable access to quality education in the country as there is prevalent currently in the context of ever-expanding profiteering by the private sector schools, colleges and universities. The public schools, meanwhile, have been rendered redundant. Public sector colleges and universities are fast deteriorating.

The Vision 2025 for higher education was a highly ambitious wish list. It mentioned technological developments taking place in some of the most developed countries. It aimed at bringing forth the fourth industrial revolution with digital technology “without even having brought about the first industrial revolution that took place in Eighteenth-Century England,” laments Waseem. A review of this document is sufficient to highlight the inherent weaknesses and capacity problems of policy making institutions in the country.

“The AI has hacked into the operating system of human civilisation. Storytelling computers will soon change the course of history,” says Yuval Noah Harari. The AI may create many new possibilities, asymmetries among the countries and regions as well as within countries will increase manifold. The class structure, haves and have-nots, will reify and intensify with developments taking place in fields of bio-engineering, bio-informatics and the AI.

There is an urgent need to revamp our education system. The prevailing educational streams – the mainstream and the madrassah - will continue to contribute to unemployment. A discernible decline in enrollment in public sector universities has been witnessed in recent years. Increasing unemployment will create social forces extremely difficult, if not impossible, to tackle peacefully.

The writer heads the History Department at University of Sargodha. He has worked as a research fellow at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He can be reached at abrar.zahoor@hotmail.com His X handle: @AbrarZahoor1