Much hype has been created about Artificial Intelligence (AI) before and after the recent summit, as world leaders and leading technical experts shared their experience and expertise. In his inaugural address, Prime Minister Modi presented India’s Manav (human) vision for AI and, at the end, the Delhi Declaration, adopted by 86 countries and two organisations, called “for collaborative, trusted, resilient and efficient AI with benefits being shared by humanity.
The big question is whether AI will benefit humanity per se and whether India, with limited R&D spending, will have the resources to create AI infrastructure. India’s R&D spend stood at 0.7% of GDP in 2024, compared to 2.7% of China and 3.5% in the US. Not just these two countries, India spends much less among emerging economies and possibly the lowest among G20 nations. The picture is even more disheartening in absolute GDP terms. Apart from the government’s not-so-encouraging attitude, private investment also remains quite low compared with China, Japan, and the US. China’s electronics giant Huawei alone spent nearly $23 billion on R&D in 2023, more than India’s combined public and private spending.
If intentions are not matched with technological and financial support, the nation can not proceed much farther. AI is still in its infancy in the country, though it has built an LLM that supports 22 languages. However, it remains to be seen how much investment India can finally attract after initial estimates reveal that nearly $70 billion has reportedly flowed into AI-related investments.
Barring IITs, science infrastructure and research facilities even in well-known universities need much to be desired, and additional funds must be provided by the Centre. India’s agenda rests on three normative pillars, i.e. people, planet and progress, but it appears quite misleading about what this means, especially for a developing country like ours. While it is claimed that AI would benefit the common man, it has not been enumerated how agriculture, food security and healthcare would come to the rescue of the lower segments of society.
There is no problem in being over-ambitious. The reportedly $200 billion expected in AI in frastructure over the next two years, even if it becomes a reality in double the time, would augur well for the country.
The challenges cannot be overlooked, as the spectre of human job displacement with the rise of AI cannot be doubted. Even the founder of Sun Microsystems has stated that though AI reshapes global services and has opportunities for India, “those will be very, very disruptive to the Indian economy.” As an example, he maintained that “IT services will go away by 2030” and there will be no such thing as BPO. The scope of AI’s weaponisation is already being used to foment social division, hate, invade privacy or impersonate individuals in many societies. Apart from imparting skills to harness the technology, the question that comes up is the need to placea legal, digital and public protective framework to back AI when it goes rogue.
An important question was raised by Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal that keeping in view that only a handful of countries are leading the AI domain with frontier models, people of most other nations should be mindful of the effects of the risks that are being taken and that are going to affect societies. “We need to understand it socially because there’s a social component psychologically in the case of AI, because we’re talking about systems that interact with people and language.”
Another key question that arises is the effect of AI on healthcare for the common man. It has not yet been outlined that those who remain undiagnosed for diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and even cancer — spreading very fast – will benefit from this new technology. AI for Big Pharma will not benefit the common man.
Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, in his book ‘Technofeudalism’ sees this age as a return to feudalism. In his portrayal, AI companies are the new extractors, and ordinary citizens must pay their dues to be able to go about their lives. He underlined the fact that most of these companies are based in the US and China, and many have deep links to the state apparatus.
Therefore, it’s imperative for India and countries in the Global South to learn from the past and frame the issue right this time around. AI corporations, like the trading companies of yore, may be just service providers today but contain the seeds of a new kind of sovereign entity.
There is a strong argument in favour of equipping more people with AI literacy, building the computing and energy infrastructure that powers advanced AI systems and in tegrating AI more fully into the real workforce. India is well-positioned to develop AI literacy and the necessary infrastructure needed to broaden the benefits of technology, though much depends on the resources it could marshal towards this end.
