*HUMANITY: THE COWS OF THE FUTURE?*
By Oumar Farouk Sesay
In his book *Nexus* and subsequent lectures on artificial intelligence, historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari advances a deeply unsettling proposition: humanity may become the cows of the future.
At first encounter, the analogy sounds almost absurd. Yet beneath its apparent simplicity lies a profound warning about the future of human intelligence, autonomy, and civilisation.
Consider the cow.
It is aware of human existence. It sees us, hears us, and interacts with us. Yet it possesses no understanding of the elaborate economic systems that determine its fate. It knows nothing of money, commodity markets, stock exchanges, or the invisible transactions through which its existence acquires commercial value. Decisions about whether it will be bred, sold, transported, or slaughtered are made within structures entirely beyond its comprehension.
The cow inhabits the same physical world as its human masters but remains intellectually excluded from the systems of power that govern its existence.
Harari invites us to contemplate the disturbing possibility that humanity may eventually occupy a similar position within an ecosystem increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence.
As AI develops capabilities that surpass human cognition in particular domains, it may construct systems of reasoning, decision-making, and organisation so sophisticated that human beings can neither fully comprehend nor meaningfully interrogate them. We may remain conscious of AI’s existence, interact with its manifestations, and depend upon its decisions, while remaining largely ignorant of the processes through which those decisions are reached.
Just as the cow cannot comprehend the livestock market that determines its destiny, humanity may struggle to understand the algorithmic architecture that increasingly shapes its future.
The deeper danger is not necessarily that artificial intelligence will become hostile to humanity. It is that human beings may become progressively irrelevant to the systems governing their lives.
We could surrender our agency without recognising the moment of its departure.
Indeed, the surrender may not come through coercion but through consent. We may willingly outsource our judgement, creativity, memory, and critical faculties to machines that promise greater speed, efficiency, and precision. What begins as assistance could gradually become dependence, and what begins as dependence could eventually become subordination.
The danger, therefore, is not merely that machines may become more intelligent than humans, but that humans may become less inclined to exercise their own intelligence.
This possibility gives particular significance to an observation by Sam Kargbo, who raises the prospect that the greatest danger may not be machines learning to think better than lawyers, but lawyers, and indeed everyone else, becoming increasingly satisfied with allowing machines to do their thinking.
His observation touches the nerve of the emerging technological dilemma.
For centuries, humanity has celebrated intelligence as the defining attribute of its ascendancy over other species. We have built institutions of learning, developed elaborate systems of knowledge, and cultivated the capacity to question, reason, imagine, and innovate. Our intellectual curiosity has been the engine of our advancement.
Yet we now stand at a peculiar crossroads in human history. Having developed machines to extend our cognitive capabilities, we risk allowing those same machines to diminish our inclination to think independently.
There is a fundamental distinction between using intelligence to enhance human judgement and surrendering judgement to an intelligence we no longer understand.
The first expands human possibilities. The second threatens human autonomy.
A lawyer who uses artificial intelligence to examine precedents, identify inconsistencies, and sharpen legal arguments may become more effective. But a lawyer who uncritically accepts machine-generated interpretations risks surrendering the very faculty that gives legal reasoning its value: the capacity to interrogate evidence, challenge assumptions, and exercise independent judgement.
The same applies to doctors, teachers, journalists, scientists, policymakers, and ordinary citizens.
The danger becomes particularly grave when algorithmic decisions migrate from assisting individuals to governing institutions. When financial markets, legal systems, public administration, healthcare, and democratic processes increasingly depend upon technologies whose operations are opaque, the question is no longer simply whether machines can think.
It becomes whether human beings can still meaningfully govern the systems they have created.
And here lies another troubling dimension of the analogy.
Artificial intelligence does not emerge from an intellectual vacuum. It is trained on the accumulated knowledge, prejudices, assumptions, contradictions, and historical experiences of humanity. The biases that have divided societies across centuries can find their way into the algorithms we develop.
We may therefore be constructing systems that not only exceed our cognitive reach but also reproduce, amplify, and institutionalise the very injustices we have struggled to overcome.
The prejudices of yesterday could become the automated decisions of tomorrow.
An algorithm does not become impartial merely because it is mathematical. Nor does a decision become just simply because it is generated by a machine.
Indeed, when human prejudice is embedded in an opaque technological system, injustice may acquire a new and more formidable disguise: the appearance of scientific objectivity.
This raises an uncomfortable question. If humanity has struggled for centuries to govern itself fairly, what guarantees that the intelligence it creates from the records of its imperfect history will govern it any better?
Yet Harari’s analogy also demands an important qualification.
Unlike cows, human beings possess the capacity to interrogate the systems they create, establish ethical boundaries, and exercise collective political judgement. We can demand transparency, insist upon accountability, regulate technological power, and preserve meaningful human oversight.
Our descent into algorithmic subordination is therefore not inevitable.
But avoiding it will require more than technological sophistication. It will demand intellectual vigilance, ethical imagination, political courage, and international cooperation at a time when humanity appears increasingly inclined towards division rather than collective responsibility.
There is something profoundly contradictory about a civilisation developing technologies capable of transcending national boundaries while retreating into narrow nationalism, racial antagonism, and ideological hostility.
We are creating intelligence that may operate beyond the limitations of geography, culture, and political identity, even as we revive the ancient prejudices that have repeatedly undermined human cooperation.
At the very moment humanity most needs a common ethical framework to govern an unprecedented technological transformation, it appears increasingly preoccupied with the divisions of its past.
We are approaching tomorrow with yesterday’s mind.
The ultimate irony would be that humanity, having spent millennia asserting its intellectual supremacy over other species, might create an intelligence before which its own cognitive superiority becomes obsolete.
We may discover, too late, that being the creator of an intelligence does not guarantee remaining its master.
But perhaps the most disturbing question is not whether artificial intelligence will eventually treat us as we treat cows. It is whether we will retain the intellectual independence to recognise the moment we become the livestock of our own creation.
For the tragedy of humanity may not be that machines eventually learn to think without us, but that we become so accustomed to machines thinking for us that we gradually forget how, and eventually why, we needed to think in the first place.
The ultimate danger may not be the extinction of human intelligence, but its voluntary abdication.
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