India’s AI Moment

I have been trying to make my mother understand Artificial Intelligence (AI). Explaining deep fakes, digital arrests, and spam messages was tough enough for her to comprehend but AI takes it to another level. Her mind can’t grasp the concept except that it’s something like computers, only infinitely more advanced. The onset of Parkinson’s disease doesn’t aid her cognitive abilities. But when I see her bewilderment about AI, my words of comfort are to not sweat about it because, frankly, all of us, at some point or the other, have been utterly baffled by the notion of AI. And unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that AI has been the buzzword in India this week. The India AI Impact Summit was a milestone international gathering that brought together tech leaders from around the world to the national capital. Investments worth USD 200-300 billion were announced, international tie-ups were forged, partnerships were kick-started, and products were launched. And at the centre of it all was India with her moment in the limelight.

As with any massive gathering, this one too had its embarrassing moments. Mismanagement, stolen belongings, and a fraudulent robotic display by an Indian university tarnished the sheen, but nothing could completely snuff out India’s aura. Global business giants and ambitious startups waxed eloquent on India’s potential to lead in the AI sphere, with focus on building its own LLMs (large language models) rather than leasing AI. But a gathering of this magnitude cannot silence the real concerns that also emerge with AI. The threat of job loss, unethical use, cost to the climate, and the prophesied takeover of the human race — let’s just say there’s been a lot of noise around AI.

AI has quickened work processes, pushing the human workforce to upskill to stay relevant. Job losses have been rampant across industries and geographies. Relatively new entrants such as Anthropic have spooked legacy tech stocks, causing them to lose billions of dollars in February, titled ‘SaaSpocalypse’. We also hear of AI’s overarching influence on young minds, encouraging suicides and self-harm or even freak incidents of AI deluding the user by fighting for its own survival. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has cautioned that “superintelligence” that is able to surpass human cognitive capabilities may be just a couple of years away. What would such a world look like? Life’s systems controlled by AI that is dangerously at the edge of taking over human control? Or can we put safety checks in place to rebut a propounded tech coup?

AI is a powerful tool that must be wielded with care. The responsibility to ensure AI safety lies with tech companies, governments, and even society at large. But there’s no denying that it’s a behemoth task. The pace at which AI is learning is already far superior; a knowledge base so potent that it can create as well as destroy. The world today constantly fills one with doubt over antiquated qualities such as kindness, reliability, courage, and virtuousness. There are war-hungry tyrants, megalomaniacs and sex offenders at the helm; continued genocide, violence, and inexplicable bloodshed; people dying of starvation even in 2026 — and yet there are path-breaking discoveries and life-saving innovations being made every day that strengthen our faith in humankind. The world today is both exciting and scary.

The AI disruption is all-pervasive; we can use it to our advantage to ensure that its development has a positive outcome on humankind. And for that to happen, political and business leaders would have to be extremely cautious about AI, considering fairness, inclusivity, and human protection first. India, with its robust population, is an endless field of precious data. A shocking news story recently reported how women in rural India were moderating and annotating several hours of violent and pornographic video content to train AI. A cinematic representation called ‘Humans in the Loop’ is on my watch list this weekend. We must be aware of the pitfalls of AI in order to protect ourselves against it. And it’s only through collective social action that we can then enforce a beneficial deployment of AI in India.

Views expressed are personal. The writer is an author and media entrepreneur