Till now, it was salesmen who dominated the AI narrative. All kinds of goods from GPUs and cooling systems to software and electrical contractors were shouting from the rooftop that progress and AI purchases had a direct correlation.
And the ultimate circular entry loops started. It was like the telecom party. Lucent would give equity to a telco so they could pay license fees and then raise money to buy equipment. And so on. This time it got so hilarious that a IT services major got into the data centre business hoping to pay all vendors in kind – through over priced services. The party got so funny that the AI vendors over-keen to book expenses were buying services at 4x of market value and selling goods at 10x of cost. It was like the gold rush where the shovel makers made the most money. Or World Wars where the tent makers made the most money.
A year ago, a public release sought inputs on technologies to control rogue technologies.
And ai topped the list of potentially rogue technologies. Ai not only posed a risk directly but could also become a conduit for dangerous software to entire into a secure system or an otherwise cyber safe enterprise. With potentially disastrous repercussions.
Memes spoke to military as being an ai resilient career. What was the purpose of war if people could play golf whilst one set of drones killed another set of drones. The object of war was to kill and maim. And ai seemed to have the potential to make it worse. That is when serious civilisational watchers got active.
The IIT Alumni Council announced the Megaspheres orientation over a year ago. And the Pope released an encyclical earlier this week.
These are the first two major civilisation impact assessing documents. The two frameworks seem to complement each other and the stage is set for a global debate on these.
The first major event planned is a world leaders meet and surprisingly, the Dias is going to be occupied not by political leaders, but by religious leaders and intellectuals. Clearly from the face of things around the world – intellectuals and political leaders seem to be a mutually exclusive set.
The strongest institutions in the non profit space like the RSS and the various institutions under their umbrella will need a major pivot to keep relevance in the ai age. As challenges shift to livelihood in a robot infested age – old mottos like “har haat ko kaam aur Har khet ko pani” lose relevance.
Nationalism is emerging as the over arching consideration for capacity addition and for now the borderless business world is putting up new borders to ring fence economies.
Food and energy security are top of the line. And the threat is to both food exporters and importers. Exporters were historically subsidised. But going forward, that money will have to be diverted to ai or worse, to war.
That changes everything.
Farm subsidies are the biggest industry in the world.
