Senator Morgan Highlights Need to Demystify AI to Empower Citizens

Parliamentary Secretary in the Education, Skills, Youth, and Information Ministry, Senator Marlon Morgan, has highlighted the need to intensify efforts to demystify artificial intelligence (AI) so that citizens can understand and embrace the technology, and benefit from its use.

He said that Jamaica must ensure that its people can distinguish between AI that serves human dignity and advancement of the society versus AI that diminishes and undermines the public good.

“This is the work of demystification, and it is an urgent proposition because the more our citizens understand AI, the more agency they will have over their own futures. The less they understand it, the more susceptible they become to manipulation, to misinformation, to disinformation, to the concentration of AI’s benefits in the hands of a few,” he said.

“Our job as educators, as policy makers, as institutional leaders and administrators, is to make sure our people are upscaled. We cannot afford for our people to be left behind. We have to understand and help them to understand AI well enough to use it purposefully and to question it critically… we want to ensure that they know not only what AI can do, but what it should not be allowed to do,” he added.

Senator Morgan was addressing the opening ceremony for Excelsior Community College’s AI Conference and Professional Development Certification Workshop 2026, held recently at the institution in Kingston.

He was responding to the findings of the Public AI Readiness Study Jamaica, published by the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES) at the University of the West Indies, Mona, which indicated that only 60 per cent of respondents expressed interest in AI training.

It found that while there is strong awareness and growing everyday use of AI, more work is needed in areas such as risk literacy, trust, safeguards, and enabling conditions to ensure that AI benefits are broad-based, inclusive, and development oriented.

The study indicated that public trust in AI was 5.45 out of 10, with 81 per cent of respondents strongly supporting moderate or strict oversight of AI technologies.

“Jamaica scored 60 out of 100 on the Public AI Readiness Index placing us in what the researchers call ‘A Developing and Transitioning Category’,” Senator Morgan pointed out.

He said that the score “tells us something quite important; that we are not standing at the doorstep of the AI revolution, but we’re already inside those doors”.

“Jamaicans are using AI every day in education, at the workplace, in communication [and] in everyday life. Many of us use it without even knowing,” he noted.

He contended, however, that the benefits of AI are not spreading evenly, with the study showing that formal training in AI remained low across the population.

“Indeed, younger Jamaicans, students, tertiary-educated professionals and those in digitally active environments are far ahead, while other adults, lower income households for example, are being left behind,” he pointed out.

In addition, trust in AI remained conditional, and resilience against deep faith and AI-generated misinformation is still weak.

Senator Morgan noted that the challenge is no longer simply one of technological access but of “widening capability, deepening trust, strengthening governance and ensuring that AI tools do not become another mechanism through which inequalities of yesteryears are reproduced in a modern dispensation albeit in a more intelligent form.”

The Government is advancing efforts to strengthen adoption and application of AI, with some $8.2 billion committed to enhance technology across the education sector and establish Jamaica’s first state-of-the-art AI lab at the University of Technology (UTech).

“This will be a space where students and teachers alike will be able to develop solutions for schools and the nation at large,” Senator Morgan noted.

The National AI Task Force, formed in 2023, successfully delivered Jamaica’s National AI Policy recommendations in 2024, designed to ensure the ethical and responsible adoption of the technology across the island.