29/03/2025
*AI Is Not Coming for Your Job. It’s Coming for Your Excuse.*
By Dr Patrick Sokiri
A doctor asked me last week what I think about Artificial Intelligence. I wanted to tell him the truth but I was technically fire fighting, multitasking amidst the mug slinging on and offline between the government and the opposition. So today I am here and here is the reply._
AI is not something that’s “coming.” It is already here. It has arrived, sat on the veranda, opened your fridge, and is now judging your taste in food.
AI is not coming to take your job. It is coming to take the job of that guy who still believes that email is “too modern” and prefers handwriting clinic notes with three different pens. AI will not replace people. It will replace people who refuse to use it.
I speak from experience.
I learned telemedicine years ago during an online session with an Israeli doctor. The man was seated somewhere in Israel, probably in sandals, sipping lemon tea. I was sitting in South Sudan, sweating and suspicious. He plugged in a plastic stethoscope to his laptop, pressed a few buttons, and said, “Now I’m connected to a patient in Haifa.”
I nearly logged off.
This man started listening to heart sounds, measuring ECG, checking vitals, and even sending prescriptions from his sunny kitchen. All live. All online. Meanwhile, I was still shouting into a 2G line trying to ask a patient if the fever had reached the bones.
That was telemedicine. That was AI. That was the future showing up on my laptop screen with a Wi-Fi signal and a Hebrew accent.
The funny part? He had learned telemedicine from the US, brought it to Israel, and was now teaching it to African doctors over Zoom. If we do not wake up soon, we will end up learning South Sudanese technology from Uganda.
Now let’s leave medicine for a second and talk about war.
When Iran and its friends launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel, the world waited for chaos. But Israel intercepted almost all of them with chilling precision. Why? Because AI was doing the thinking.
A plane flying above coordinated the entire response, directing jets and defense systems to handle the threats in real time. It was like watching a robot DJ spin tracks in a warzone.
That wasn’t luck. That wasn’t pure human brilliance. That was artificial intelligence.
Israel is ahead because it invested in brainpower. Not just bombs. Not just borders. Brains.
Harvard Medical School now uses AI to predict cardiac arrest in ICU patients before the human doctors even suspect it. At Oxford, AI tools are being used to spot breast cancer with more accuracy than experienced radiologists. Cambridge recently showed how AI tools increased diagnostic accuracy in rural health posts by over 20 percent when used by mid-level health workers.
This is not just about high-income countries showing off. The real question is: What are we doing with these tools in South Sudan? Arrogance and badmouthing anything new...Ignorance and arrogance will keep us behind like our buttocks but better them as they hide our anuses.
We face real problems. Bad roads. Few doctors. Fragile systems. AI is not a luxury for us. It is survival.
Let me give you examples:
In Kenya, AI is helping young people get mental health support through anonymous chatbots.
In Rwanda, drones powered by AI deliver blood and medicines to rural clinics.
In Uganda, AI is used in malaria diagnosis and has cut false negatives significantly.
Meanwhile, some of our clinics still write records in exercise books labeled “Kawowo 120 pages.”
AI can help South Sudan leapfrog decades of underdevelopment. But we need to stop fearing it like it is a new disease.
In medicine alone, AI can:
1. Detect disease outbreaks before they spread.
2. Translate health materials into Bari, Dinka, Nuer, and Zande using natural language processing.
3. Help clinical officers in the village distinguish pneumonia from TB with a smartphone.
4. Monitor medication stock levels and alert suppliers before things run out.
5. Predict maternal complications using patient data.
And guess what? We do not need a big hospital with AC and leather seats. We just need smartphones, solar power, mobile internet, and the willingness to learn.
Let me talk to my fellow professionals for a moment.
If you are a doctor still resisting AI, you are not being noble. You are being dangerous. The Hippocratic Oath does not say “refuse to learn.” If anything, it tells us to keep up.
If you are a journalist, AI can help you find facts faster, track disinformation, and summarize press briefings before your editor starts breathing down your neck.
If you are a policymaker, AI can model the impact of a decision across different sectors and regions. It can analyze patterns in education, crime, or hunger.
If you are a bishop, AI can help translate the Bible into dialects with the accuracy of an angel. If you are a rebel leader, AI can tell you that rebellion rarely ends well. Unless you have oil.
If you are a student and you are not using AI tools to summarize long boring notes, you are working too hard. You are sweating in vain.
Yes, some people fear AI will make humans lazy. But they are confusing laziness with efficiency. AI takes away the boring work. It does not think for you. It thinks with you.
We should not fear AI. We should fear being left behind.
AI has passed the US medical licensing exams. It has passed the bar exam. Some say it can even write better wedding speeches than the best man. The only thing it cannot do is eat for you or attend those long family meetings on your behalf. Everything else? It can help.
Do we need regulation? Of course. But let us not pretend that ignoring it is a strategy.
If you are not learning AI now, you will soon be asking your own child to explain why your job no longer exists. And that child will reply, “But Daddy, I told you to open that app.”
Let me close with a fact that should wake us all up.
AI will not enter South Sudan with a parade. It is already here. It is in the search bar. It is in the calculator on your phone. It is in that autocorrect feature that always changes “Nyamile” to “Namibia.” It is in the apps used by humanitarian agencies to plan distribution, by banks to detect fraud, and by Facebook to decide what news you see.
It is already shaping your life whether you admit it or not.
So the next time someone tells you AI is dangerous, tell them this:
What is truly dangerous is a health worker without tools, a government without data, and a young nation that refuses to think beyond the bush.
AI is not a threat. Ignorance is.
And if you are still doubting, remember—somewhere in Israel, a man in sandals and lemon tea is still doing rounds in five countries… without leaving his kitchen.
Send me some Kagaroo milk and I will go on and on.
~By Dr Sokiri.
This image was generated using AI to ease the load of working hard to find a relevant image for this article. Teknologia! Teknologia!
