When former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon walked away from his job this month warning that "superhuman systems" could bring human extinction by 2030, lawmakers in Washington reacted with alarm. Senators, representatives, and public figures alike called for hearings, bans, and moratoriums. It was, by every measure, a serious warning from a serious researcher, and the developed world is right to take it seriously. But I write from Islamabad, not from Washington, and I ask the global community to consider a different verdict for a different world. In Pakistan, the machines are not the threat. The absence of any functioning machinery of government is the real obstacle.

Over half of Pakistan's population lives below the poverty line today; not because of an earthquake, a flood, or an invading army, but because governance has collapsed from within. This is not a controversial claim in Pakistan; it is now spoken aloud by the country's own most powerful men. Both the Director General of ISPR and the Minister of Interior have, in recent months, publicly acknowledged the scale of the crisis facing the state. And yet neither offered a solution. That is the real tragedy of Pakistan in 2026: the diagnosis is known, spoken from the most powerful podiums in the land, and still nothing changes.

Let me be unambiguous about this, as an engineer, before anyone accuses me of techno-utopianism. AI is a digital tool. It cannot physically build a single house, sew a single garment, grow a single grain of wheat, or generate a single watt of energy. At its core it is code running on servers, and no nation can eat data. Anyone who tells you AI alone will feed Pakistan is lying to you. But while AI cannot manufacture bread, it can dismantle the theft that keeps bread from reaching people who have already paid for it. And in........

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