Articles and Updates

Over my own lifetime, I have seen so much new technology that my father’s generation could not have even imagined. The last 200 hundred years of human history, especially in the domain of industrial and technological progress primarily driven by the West, while exploiting the raw materials, labor, and land of the East, has forever changed the face of the world.  Each new technology, be it radio communications, light bulb, steam engine, internet, mobile phone, industrial automation, digitization, etc. each was ushered in with euphoria that they will make us more connected, improve the human condition, and make people freer. While creature comfort, travel, cure of disease, instant communication is certainly here and will continue to serve humanity,  this rush to greater comfort, consumerism and control of the resources of the world have resulted in much darker side as well – polarization in society, spread of misinformation, unprecedented degradation of the quality of air, water, soil on which our life depends on, rapid depletion of natural resources, greater and pervasive income and wealth inequality within and across societies, creation of weapons of mass destruction and ever readiness to use such weapons, mostly on poorer countries and imagined adversaries with less and less moral and ethical justification other than power grab, land grab and humiliation of the “others”.

It is in this landscape we now find facing another technological revolutions – that is of Artificial Intelligence (AI)” – that is being touted as bigger and more impactful than all of the above since it can integrate all of the above technologies into a human like agency, that was only available to humans themselves, though colonial imperialism and super power hegemony had driven vast populations on the margin and denied benefits from such breath-taking technology.  The same mobile telephony that connected vast swath of humanity with one another and gave rise to insane social media engrossment, the same tool is also integral to a surveillance society, increasingly practiced by democratic and authoritarian countries alike.

Large Language Models (LLMs), which are the key building blocks of AI, have progressed more rapidly than any other existing technology from the past and can integrate most current technologies, the Internet of things, and human activities on a scale that was unthinkable even a decade ago. In addition, AI is poised to integrate all bureaucratic functions of human societies – be it running a factory, supervising activities of a government agency, or analyzing vast swaths of data from disparate sources with memory, capabilities, and efficiency that are already better than human agents.  It can write computer code, mimic human voices, generate life-like videos, and so on and so forth, and eventually we will not be able to distinguish who is behind a particular data, voice, or action.  Add to that the decision-making capability to pay a bill, drop a bomb, or surveil a person with legal or illegal intent, even before a human agent can intervene, should make anyone rethink what we are creating.  The oligarchs who are driving these innovations are increasingly coming from a greed- and profit-making mindset, already aligning themselves with or being coerced by corrupt regimes and administrations, and have already been implicated in serving the interests of those who have committed war crimes, helping to create a surveillance society and economy on ordinary citizens and employees in democratic nations, across occupied lands and in global diplomacy.

This is uncharted territory and will require the best of us to get ahead of this technology before it pushes all of us into a race to the bottom - where the only bottom line is profit, social and political polarization, and the removal of the ethical and moral framework that sustained humanity from the beginning, however imperfect such a framework had been.

The key question is – do we have the moral clarity, social and political will, and commitment to human agency in the face of this new technology, which certainly can enhance human capability and wellbeing, but its potential to do serious harm may far outweigh its benefits, especially if we do not act in time, and that time is fast approaching to a point of no return!