When Everyone Is Smart, Who Gets Chosen?

May 03, 2026 Features / Columnists, News

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By Dr. Karen Abrams, Ed.D.

(Kaieteur News) – There was a time when knowledge itself created advantage. The person who knew more, who had access to better information, who earned a number of “subjects”, who could code, calculate, analyze, design, or write faster than everyone else, stood apart. In many fields, that advantage shaped careers, businesses, reputations, and social mobility.

That era is changing quickly. Today, a teenager with access to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any of the other large language models can write an essay, debug code, design a flyer, generate a business plan, summarize a report, build a simple application, and prepare a presentation in minutes. Artificial intelligence has not made everyone brilliant, but it has made capability more widely available than at any other time in human history.

That shift forces a new question, especially for young people in Guyana and across the developing world; when everyone can produce, who gets chosen? The answer will not rest on price alone. It will not rest only on technical skill. Increasingly, the person who gets chosen will be the person who can be trusted. This is the central challenge of the AI age.

The 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey found that 84% of respondents were already using or planning to use AI tools in their development process. Across writing, design, marketing, research, education, engineering, and business strategy, AI is lowering the barrier to entry. Tasks that once required years of training can now be attempted by almost anyone with an internet connection and the curiosity to begin.

That is good news for countries like Guyana. A child in Berbice, Linden, Bartica, Lethem, Essequibo, or Georgetown can now learn, build, test, and create at a level that would have been almost impossible a decade ago.

But access to tools is not the same as adoption. Decades after email became basic to modern communication, there are still citizens who have never meaningfully used it. Some do not have email installed on their phones. Some have an address only because someone created it for them. In many cases, this is not laziness. It is connected to literacy, poverty, limited exposure, age, geography, culture, fear, habit, or simple disinterest.

We see the same pattern with mobile apps created to make life easier in Guyana. Apps are launched. Press releases are issued. Officials pose for photographs. But many of these platforms later languish because citizens do not download them, do not trust them, or do not see them as part of their daily lives. Technology does not transform societies by itself. People have to be prepared, persuaded, trained, supported, and included.

That is why AI may widen the gap between citizens instead of closing it. For those who are curious, literate, connected, and already comfortable with technology, AI will be an amplifier. It will help them write better, code faster, research deeper, and compete beyond their local environment. But for those who do not engage, AI will not simply pass them by. It may push them further behind.

The worker who uses AI to improve communication and problem-solving will become more competitive. The small business owner who uses AI for marketing, bookkeeping, and planning will gain an advantage. Meanwhile, the citizen who remains outside the digital world will face a harsher economy, where expectations rise but support does not always follow.

This is the danger. AI may make inequality sharper. It may widen the educational divide between children whose parents and teachers encourage digital exploration and those who are told to stay away from technology. That is why the AI conversation in Guyana cannot be only about apps, platforms, and announcements. It must also be about literacy, trust, public education, community training, and cultural acceptance.

Even among those who do engage, the marketplace will become crowded. AI will produce a flood of acceptable work. Not perfect. Not exceptional. But acceptable. There will be more apps, more designs, more business plans, more essays, and more proposals than ever before. When everyone can create something, people will begin to ask deeper questions.

Can I rely on this person? Will they finish what they started? Do they communicate clearly? Do they stand behind their work? Will they show up when something goes wrong? Can I trust them with my money, my project, my child, my data, my reputation, or my business?  These are human questions. That is why the future will reward brand, trust, relationships, quality, and communication. These are no longer soft extras. They are survival skills. A personal brand is not a logo. It is not a clever slogan. A brand is the accumulated evidence of how you behave over time. It is the memory of your reliability.

For young people, this matters deeply.  The future will reward finishers. It will reward people who can take an idea from concept to completion. AI can produce quickly, but it cannot guarantee excellence. Excellence still requires judgment, revision, testing, honesty, feedback, and care.  This is where education systems must pay attention. If we continue to train children only to memorize, obey, and repeat, we will fail them. AI can already retrieve information faster than any child. It can summarize, translate, generate, and explain. The human advantage now lies elsewhere.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that analytical thinking remains one of the most sought-after core skills among employers. It also identified resilience, flexibility, leadership, and social influence among the most important skills for the future of work. Technical ability matters, but human capability will increasingly determine who advances.

That is why confidence matters. Confidence does not mean arrogance. It means clarity. It means a young person can stand before others and explain an idea, defend their thinking, ask questions, receive feedback, admit what they do not know, and return with a better version. In Guyana, too many children are trained to be quiet in the presence of authority. Too many are punished for questioning. But the modern economy will not reward silence. It will reward young people who can think, speak, collaborate, persuade, and lead.

For many families, especially working-class families, networking can sound like something reserved for elites. But networking is simply the discipline of building and sustaining meaningful relationships.  Many young people are talented, but talent often remains invisible without connection. Too many have been trained to treat relationships as temporary conveniences, reaching out only when they need help, then disappearing when the need has passed. That is not networking. Real networking is a lifelong commitment to nurturing relationships that matter. It means contributing as well as benefiting, showing up consistently, offering value, and becoming the kind of person others are willing to recommend, support, and trust.

At STEMGuyana, this insight shaped our approach from early. We understood that it was never enough to teach children coding and robotics in isolation. The larger goal was always to help children learn how to work in teams, explain ideas, build confidence, form relationships, compete with dignity, recover from failure, and take ownership of their work. That approach now feels even more urgent. The future does not belong to those who can simply use technology. It belongs to those who can combine technology with discipline, character, judgment, and presence.

Guyana is entering a period of enormous economic opportunity. Oil revenues, infrastructure expansion, and new business activity will create openings. But if our young people are not prepared to distinguish themselves, many of those openings will go to others.

The national challenge today is even bigger than preparing the most motivated young people. We must also bring along those who are not yet engaged. We must reach the child whose parents do not understand technology. We must reach the adult who is embarrassed to admit they cannot use read. We must reach the small business owner who is afraid of online payments. We must reach the rural community where connectivity exists on paper but not in practical daily life.  If we do not, Guyana will become two countries. One will use AI to move faster, learn faster, earn more, and access wider markets. The other will remain outside the systems that increasingly determine opportunity. That cannot be our future.

The answer is not to slow down those who are ready. The answer is to widen the circle of readiness. Digital literacy must become a national development priority. AI literacy must enter community centers, teacher training programs, and small business support systems. Parents must be helped to understand the tools their children are using. Teachers must be supported, not shamed. Workers must be retrained. Citizens must be shown, patiently and practically, how technology can serve their lives.

The society that succeeds will not be the one that merely announces digital transformation. It will be the one that prepares ordinary citizens to participate in it. In the end, when everyone is smart, the question is no longer only who can do the work. The question is who we choose to trust with it. And in Guyana, there is one more urgent question. Who will be prepared to participate at all?

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• Chosen, Karen Abrams, Smart

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