When former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon walked away from his job this month warning that "superhuman systems" could bring human extinction by 2030, lawmakers in Washington reacted with alarm. Senators, representatives, and public figures alike called for hearings, bans, and moratoriums. It was, by every measure, a serious warning from a serious researcher, and the developed world is right to take it seriously. But I write from Islamabad, not from Washington, and I ask the global community to consider a different verdict for a different world. In Pakistan, the machines are not the threat. The absence of any functioning machinery of government is the real obstacle.
Over half of Pakistan's population lives below the poverty line today; not because of an earthquake, a flood, or an invading army, but because governance has collapsed from within. This is not a controversial claim in Pakistan; it is now spoken aloud by the country's own most powerful men. Both the Director General of ISPR and the Minister of Interior have, in recent months, publicly acknowledged the scale of the crisis facing the state. And yet neither offered a solution. That is the real tragedy of Pakistan in 2026: the diagnosis is known, spoken from the most powerful podiums in the land, and still nothing changes.
Let me be unambiguous about this, as an engineer, before anyone accuses me of techno-utopianism. AI is a digital tool. It cannot physically build a single house, sew a single garment, grow a single grain of wheat, or generate a single watt of energy. At its core it is code running on servers, and no nation can eat data. Anyone who tells you AI alone will feed Pakistan is lying to you. But while AI cannot manufacture bread, it can dismantle the theft that keeps bread from reaching people who have already paid for it. And in Pakistan, the theft is the whole problem.
I have seen this up close. In 2008, I designed and piloted a real-time monitoring commission to track PSDP development projects, following public money as it moved and flagging cost overruns and quality issues as they happened. It worked and was demonstrated successfully. Then the Chairman of the Planning Commission quietly dropped it. No one ever told me why. But Pakistan's ranking on every transparency index, and the state of its judiciary, already explains the answer. Digitization threatens the nexus between rulers and bureaucrats who profit from opacity, and that nexus defends itself every time.
I tried again, more recently, at the federal minister's own request. I shared, repeatedly, a detailed plan to help resolve the circular debt crisis and bring down the cost of electricity and gas with Ahsan Iqbal, Federal Minister for Planning. He reached out to me himself, unprompted, asking for the solution. I gave it to him. And then — silence. Three months now, and not a word. He remains untouched by the load-shedding and despair this crisis inflicts on ordinary Pakistanis, so there is no urgency compelling him to act — he is, after all, part of the same elite class that has never had to wait in a queue for fuel or flinch at an electricity bill. This is the pattern of Pakistani governance: those with the power to fix a crisis are the only people entirely insulated from it.
This is precisely where AI stops being a luxury for Pakistan and becomes a necessity. Imagine an administration run on AI-audited systems, where every rupee of public spending is tracked the way my 2008 commission proposed, where every procurement contract is checked in real time, where no minister can quietly shelve an uncomfortable truth. An AI-informed government would not sit on Pakistan's shale oil and gas policy for eleven years, while the country borrows dollars it does not have to import fuel it already possesses underground. It would revise the Power Purchase Agreements with Independent Power Producers, a legally available option that has been avoided for years and begin unwinding the circular debt that strangles industry and household budgets alike.
For us, AI is not the risk. It is the audit we have been denied for seventy-eight years.
I say this in good faith, as an engineer who has studied these contracts: had artificial intelligence sat at the table when Pakistan's energy policy was written, it would never have recommended the imported LNG contracts and imported coal-fired power plants that now anchor our tariffs to dollars we do not have. No honest model, weighing the true cost of indigenous shale gas against imported fuel, would choose to impoverish a nation to enrich a handful of importers.
And here I will be forceful, because polite language has already cost too many lives. Pakistan's rulers have been so cruel in their indifference that ordinary citizens; fathers, mothers, shopkeepers have taken their own lives rather than face another unpayable electricity or gas bill. That is not policy failure; it is cruelty delivered by invoice, and the world should hear this cry with tears of blood. AI cannot bring back the dead. But through honest, transparent governance, it can stop the dying.
The deepest impact, though, would not be economic. It would be moral. Transparency starves corruption, and corruption is the mother of insurgency. The unrest in Balochistan, Azad Jammu and Kashmir, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is not, at its root, ideological. It is grievance over resources stolen, jobs denied, and merit ignored by a system that rewards connections over competence. A government audited in real time cannot easily hand out jobs on the basis of whose father someone is. When youth in these regions finally see merit, not lineage, decide their future, this federation's unity will be rebuilt in a way decades of speeches never achieved.
I say this as a father, too. Both of my children now hold master's degrees in Artificial Intelligence and Systems Intelligence and are continuously working on it, and their generation is the one I have in mind when I make this case. They are proof that Pakistan already possesses the human capital to build the transparent systems the state refuses to build for itself. The tools exist. What has been missing is a government willing to let itself be watched.
Let the world worry, rightly, about superintelligence in laboratories with the resources to build systems beyond human control that is a real conversation for the countries racing toward it. But Pakistan is not racing toward superintelligence; it is drowning in the ordinary, deliberate opacity of men who have never been forced to explain themselves. For us, AI is not the risk. It is the audit we have been denied for seventy-eight years. Pakistan cannot wait for another messiah. The material required to produce an honest, capable, truthful leader has simply not been available to this country for a generation. If a referendum were held today asking whether Pakistanis would trust an AI-run administration over the rulers who have governed them, I believe more than ninety percent would vote yes, not out of love for machines, but out of exhaustion with men. Because right now, for too many of us, this is not living. We are simply dead bodies still breathing, waiting for someone, or something, willing to finally show us the truth.