Epistemic Delegation and Africa’s Future in the Age of AI

The rapid rise of autonomous AI agents marks a shift in how people and computers interact. We are moving to entities that can plan, act, and learn with little or no human control. Sub-Saharan Africa is significantly underrepresented in global AI model development, computational infrastructure ownership, and large-scale dataset production, resulting in continued reliance on technologies developed predominantly outside the region. This paper argues that AI agents introduce a qualitatively different phenomenon: epistemic delegation, where not only task execution is delegated by humans but also judgment, prioritization, and knowledge production to autonomous systems. This has a capacity to create some setbacks for Africa if contexts are not prioritized in the reconfiguration of algorithm systems. This study adopts a phenomenologically-informed conceptual methodology that combines interdisciplinary conceptual synthesis and analytically constructed vignettes derived from empirical AI deployment patterns and contemporary scholarship. The focus is on societies that mainly consume, rather than produce, state-of-the-art AI.