October, 2026

In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV warns that machine intelligence in war ends by “reducing victims to data.” The machine profiling that registers a person for food can also be used to select a person as a target. A small drone circling a road, with no one steering it, can have such a profile as its target. A drone like this is an autonomous weapon system. Once activated, it selects and attacks targets by itself, matching what its sensors detect to a programmed target profile. No human being decides, at the moment of the strike, that this particular person will die or is the right target. The case most often cited as the first use of such a weapon against people, reported by UN experts, was in Africa, in Libya in 2020.

Democracy, which has historically proven most effective in meeting these criteria, cannot be taken for granted. In our AI era, citizens should press for more than multiparty elections and the protection of basic freedoms; that institutional core is not enough. We must carefully regulate and channel powerful technologies with the capacity to divide us from one another and short-circuit social and political participation. That means maintaining spaces in civil society where human contact and social friendship can flourish without the mediation of machines, beginning with the educational systems through which all citizens pass. It means fighting deepfakes and disinformation in the public sphere, so that citizens still operate in a world of facts and evidence and political representation has a strong basis.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly entering public life in Ghana, including through digital systems used for identification, verification and service delivery. The ethical question is therefore not simply what AI can do, but what happens to people when digital systems become gateways through which citizenship, mobility or access to services are recognised. In northern Ghana, especially in border communities, this is a concrete question. I was privilege to visit Pusiga community in November 2025 with a Jesuit friend of my mine who is originally from the community. Thus, the topic for this article resonates very well with me.