The Year We Did Not See Coming

Note from the President

December 1 was World AIDS Day. Forty years on from the start of the epidemic, the disease that re-ordered Caribbean public health in the 1980s and 1990s is still with us, though it sits more quietly than it used to. Whatever the next reorganization of medicine looks like, and AI will be part of that, the lesson of the AIDS years remains true. The communities that suffer the most are the ones with the least voice in the room where treatments are designed. We have to keep insisting on the room.

This issue closes our first half year. Naila Rampersad has written our year-end reflection, and I am glad she did, because she sees the region the way I want this newsletter to see it. We have grown from 612 members at our August launch to 3,847 as of last Friday. We are smaller than I hoped and larger than I had reason to expect. Thank you for being here.

The Working Group on AI in Health released its position paper to the CARICOM Health Ministers ahead of their meeting on the twelfth. The paper is at caribbeanaiassociation.com/policy. Read it, share it, send corrections to the team.

A safe and quiet holiday to all of you and your families. We will see you in January.

Adrian Dunkley Founder and President, Caribbean AI Association

---

Feature

The Year We Did Not See Coming

By Naila Rampersad

I want to start in a particular kitchen. It is in San Fernando, the kitchen belongs to my Auntie Pearl, and the table is yellow Formica with a hairline crack running through the corner where my cousin Marvin sat too hard on it when he was nine. Auntie Pearl is seventy-eight. In April she asked me what ChatGPT was. By August she was using it to draft the welcome letter for her church's harvest festival. By October she had a paid subscription on a phone she still calls "the cellular." She told me, with the satisfaction of a woman who has just won an argument, that she liked it because it explained things to her without making her feel like she was in the way.

I have been thinking about Auntie Pearl all year. Twelve months ago the conversations I was having about AI in this region were academic, or technical, or quietly anxious. They were conversations among people who already worked with technology. By the autumn of this year they were conversations on the bus from Couva to Port of Spain, on the porch of a guesthouse in Dominica, in the small business association meeting I went to in Belize City, and in a yellow kitchen in San Fernando. Something shifted in 2024 that nobody had quite prepared us for. The most consequential technology of our time stopped being something professionals discussed and became something grandmothers used. That is the year as I will remember it.

It is hard to write a year-end reflection in a year that did not have a single defining event. The technology arrived in waves. In February the image generators reached a quality that made every newspaper photo desk in the region rethink its contracts with stock photo libraries. In April the voice models reached a point where you could talk to a phone in standard Trinidadian English and it would mostly track you. In the summer the agents began. By autumn the leading systems could plan a small task, take some steps to complete it, and report back, and the question of what work is and is not delegable started to feel less like a thought experiment.

For our region this raised a particular set of questions that are not the same as the questions being asked elsewhere. In Silicon Valley they are arguing about whether AI will achieve some general intelligence and what that will mean for civilization. In Brussels they are arguing about the right calibration of risk classes under the AI Act. In Beijing they are arguing about whose model wins. In a yellow kitchen in San Fernando the argument is simpler and more important. Will this thing help me. Will it cost me money I do not have. Will it understand my grandson when he speaks. Will it tell me the truth about my blood pressure medication, or will it tell me a confident wrong thing.

I spent much of the year traveling between CAIRA member countries listening to those kinds of questions. A few patterns are worth naming.

The pace of adoption among older Caribbean people has surprised everyone, including me. The assumption that AI tools would be a youth phenomenon, and that the over-sixty population would resist them, has not held up against the evidence I have seen. The reason, I think, is that the chat interface is forgiving in a way that no previous computing interface has been. You do not need to remember what the menu is called. You ask the thing in words. For a generation that learned to write letters in school and was then asked to learn graphical user interfaces, command lines, mobile apps, and social media in succession, an interface that takes English back is not a regression. It is a relief.

The professional fear that I expected in the middle of the year has, mostly, not arrived in the form I expected. The Caribbean journalists I spoke to in February assumed the AI tools would write them out of work by December. They have not. What has happened, and what most journalists I know have privately admitted, is that the tools have absorbed the parts of journalism that nobody wanted to do anyway, the transcription, the press release rewrites, the routine listicle. The actual work, finding the story, knocking on the door, being in the room, has not been touched. Whether that holds is another year's question.

The institutional response, by contrast, has been slower than the situation warrants. Most of our Ministries of Education entered 2024 without a policy on AI in classrooms. Most exit 2024 in the same condition. The CXC has begun a serious conversation about the integrity of CSEC and CAPE in a world of AI-assisted study, and that conversation is welcome, but it is one conversation in one institution. The procurement policies of our public services, our health authorities, our customs and revenue departments have not in most cases been rewritten to deal with the question of how an AI-assisted vendor should be evaluated, what disclosures should be required, and how the public's data should be protected. Every member of CAIRA who has ever sat in a Caribbean public service knows that policies do not write themselves and budgets do not appear by hope. The work is the work, and 2025 is when it gets done.

The most surprising thing I learned this year is how much of the AI conversation is, when you sit close enough to hear it, actually a conversation about something else. In Port of Spain it is a conversation about whether the country is being left behind. In Kingston it is a conversation about whether we are losing the parts of ourselves that make us unmistakable. In Castries it is a conversation about whether the next generation will stay, and whether the tools will help them, and whether the help will be worth what it costs. The technology is the surface. Underneath the technology is the same conversation we have been having for sixty years about what kind of region we are going to be.

In the kitchen with Auntie Pearl, I asked her what she thought about all of this. She told me she did not have an opinion yet, because she was still learning the thing. She also told me that her great-niece in Sangre Grande had used the AI to write a cover letter for a job at a hotel in Tobago. The great-niece got the interview. Auntie Pearl was proud. She said it in the voice she used to use when one of us passed a CXC subject. The technology, in that moment, was not the story. The girl getting the job was the story. The technology was the kitchen.

That is the right way to think about the year, I believe. The technology is the kitchen. The story is what we cook in it. In 2025 we will get better at cooking. We will also burn things. We will figure out which dishes are worth the time and which are not, and we will fight about which ones are properly Caribbean. The Association will be there for all of it. So will I, and so will Auntie Pearl, and so will, I hope, every reader of this letter.

Happy Christmas. Walk good.

---

Naila Rampersad is a journalist based in San Fernando and writes a column on technology and Caribbean life. She joined the CAIRA Communications Committee in October.

Originally published in The Monthly Intelligence Report, December 2024.