On August 26, 2026, Bill Gates released a provocative essay titled "The Turbulent AI Era is here: the choices we make now are critical.” His reflection captures both the promise and peril of artificial intelligence (AI), urging societies to act decisively before technology shapes economies and governance beyond recognition. Coming from the man who spent decades as tech’s biggest cheerleader, that’s worth paying attention to.

Gates goes on to assert that AI worries him more than earlier technologies, because it does not need people to catch up to it. Here he cites an example of the computer age. Computers needed people to learn how to type and use software. AI does not. One can just talk to it in plain Luganda or English on a phone we own. Alas, that is exactly the kind of technology already spreading fast in Uganda, through smartphones. So, when Gates says this transition will move faster than anything before it, ideally Uganda should not watch from a safe distance; it is already inside the story!

Gates lays out many concerns, which, for space pursuers, cannot be captured in this piece. I wish to highlight his three biggest worries.

The first is jobs. He thinks AI will wipe out a lot of work—not just factory jobs, but office jobs too. He’s most worried about young people starting, because entry-level jobs are usually how people build a career, and those are the jobs AI is best at doing cheaply. Think about what that means here: over three-quarters of Uganda’s population is under 30, and finding that first real job is already hard. If AI eats the starter jobs—junior accounting, basic legal work, customer service, and entry-level IT support—young Ugandans finishing universities and tertiary institutions in the thousands yearly may find there is no first rung on the ladder left to climb. To that effect, Gates wants governments to tax AI and robots the way they tax human wages, to slow this down. Good as it sounds, this kind of tax does not apply here, for in the grand scheme of things, Uganda is neither into the AI equation that much nor into robot manufacturing. Besides, most Ugandans work informally, off the books, where there’s no payroll tax to begin with. The warning is still real. The proposed fix is not built for us, though.

The second worry is misuse. Gates says AI makes it cheaper and easier for criminals to commit fraud, fake videos and voices, and attack things like banks, hospitals, and power grids. This one should worry Uganda immediately. Our banking and mobile money system, the backbone of how ordinary people move money, was built assuming a level of trickery that AI has now blown past. A fake voice note or video pretending to be a bank official could fool people and move money before anyone catches it. That’s not a future problem. That’s a today problem, and our cybercrime response was not built for it. The nation is building from scratch.

The third worry is about children and how people think. Gates worries kids who lean too heavily on AI companions may struggle to build real relationships, and students who let AI do their thinking for them may never learn how to think hard for themselves. In Uganda, where classrooms can face a challenge of overcrowding and under-resourcing, this risk cuts deeper. On this very point, Gates raises another concern that the struggle of working through a hard problem is often the only real teaching happening. If AI takes that struggle away, it could quietly widen the gap between well-off schools in cities and urban municipalities and their counterparts in rural schools.

What should Uganda actually do with all this? Uganda cannot copy some of Gates’s suggestions for hookline and sinker. Relevant stakeholders should pick out key salient features from the essay for the Ugandan context, policy-wise and react accordingly. Rich countries with far more institutional muscle than Uganda are admitting they are behind. The Pearl of Africa does not have the luxury of preparing slowly—it never did. The honest move now is to start building the answers, not wait for a launch of yet another five-year plan in 2030!

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