JAMAICA | Before the Smart Machines, People Must Be Informed — Says Cordel Green

As Anthropic insiders warn that AI could end humanity this decade, the Broadcasting Commission’s executive director carries a small-island argument into Silicon Valley

Palo Alto is arguing about extinction. Kingston is arguing about literacy. Both conversations are about survival — and only one of them currently has a Caribbean seat at the table.

KINGSTON, Jamaica, september 12, 2026 - This week, researchers at the artificial intelligence laboratory Anthropic went public with warnings of a kind no industry has previously issued about its own products.

Jacob Coxon, who spent three years on pretraining research at OpenAI and then Anthropic, resigned and wrote that the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” accusing both companies of racing towards self-improving superintelligence and gambling with other people’s lives.

Anthropic’s alignment science lead, Evan Hubinger, publicly agreed, putting the odds at better than one in ten within the next decade and conceding that his employer has no settled plan for solving the problem. A third colleague, Samuel Marks, said developers press on regardless, driven by commercial incentive and the conviction that rivals would behave worse.

Next week, in Palo Alto, a Jamaican regulator will step into the middle of that anxiety and make a quieter argument.

Cordel Green, Executive Director of the Broadcasting Commission of Jamaica, will present a paper titled “Informed People Before Smart Machines” at the Silicon Valley Peace Conference 2026, convened under the theme “AI’s Role in Community Development and Peacebuilding in Developing Nations.”

His contention is that informed and empowered citizens must be the foundation of AI governance. “A country’s readiness for AI depends not only on technology, but on public understanding and institutional accountability,” he said.

The other risk register

Set beside Hubinger’s ten per cent, Green’s proposition can sound modest. It is not. The existential debate now consuming Silicon Valley is conducted almost entirely by the people who build the systems, inside the jurisdictions that host them.

Small island developing states enter that conversation, when they enter it at all, as territory — markets to be served, data to be harvested, populations to be protected by somebody else’s guardrails.

The Caribbean’s exposure is more immediate than extinction, and considerably better documented. A public AI readiness study by the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, launched in Kingston in May, found that only about three in ten Jamaicans had any familiarity with deepfakes and misinformation, and that just six per cent had received formal training in operating AI tools.

The Broadcasting Commission’s own 2025 public perception research found eight in ten Jamaicans supporting moderate to strict regulation of AI. A population that wants rules but cannot reliably identify a synthetic video is a population that can be governed by whoever controls the feed.

“The most important regulatory tool in the digital age is actually digital media and information literacy.”— Cordel Green, Executive Director, Broadcasting Commission of Jamaica

Credentials earned in the small rooms

Green is no newcomer to these arguments. An attorney-at-law, former Assistant Attorney-General and former broadcaster, he has led the Broadcasting Commission for the better part of two decades.

He chairs UNESCO’s Information For All Programme Working Group on Information Accessibility, sits on both Jamaica’s National AI Task Force and the Caribbean AI Task Force, and his fingerprints are on the intergovernmental negotiations that produced the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. He has argued for close to twenty years that the decisive instrument in a digital age is not prohibition but media and information literacy.

That position reads differently in September 2026 than it did in 2010. When the builders themselves describe systems that will soon hack anything and acquire real power and resources, literacy can sound like bringing a textbook to a housefire.

The counter-argument is sharper than it first appears: the realistic alternative on offer to Caribbean states is not control but dependency — importing models designed elsewhere, adjudicated elsewhere, audited by no one local, and explained to the public by no one at all.

From Palo Alto to September 28

The Palo Alto paper feeds work with a harder edge. On September 28, the International Day for Universal Access to Information, the seventh AI4IA Conference — the global platform Green initiated and chairs — will see the Broadcasting Commission join UNESCO and technology partner Mobius to launch the AI4IA Intelligence Pilot, a frontier research and capacity-building system designed to make AI workflows more accessible.

It is a small intervention by the standards of the laboratories now frightening themselves. It is also one of the few in which a Caribbean regulator is a builder rather than a recipient.

Whether developing nations shape the AI age or are shaped by it will not be settled at any conference, least of all one convened a continent away from the people whose futures are being debated. But there is something more useful than waiting for the outcome, and Jamaica appears to have found it: showing up with a paper, a pilot and a position.

The researchers who broke ranks this week were arguing about whether humanity can control what it is building. Green is arguing about who gets a say in the answer. In a region of small states with long memories of decisions taken elsewhere, that is not the smaller question.

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