Everyone is talking about AI for Good. Very few are willing to discuss AI for Bad.
I had the privilege today of reading a preview copy of Prof NK Goyal ‘s book, co authored by Govind Pathak on “Ai is bad”. Prof Goyal has been an active telecom expert for over fifty. He serves as Chairman Emeritus of TEMA and last year IIT Alumni Council inducted him in our Hall of Fame by awarding him as a distinguished fellow in telecom public policy. I was honoured to have the opportunity of writing the foreword for his book and examining it through the Megaspheres framework.
As one of India’s most audible voices in both telecom and everything cyber – his book is indeed thought provoking.
I read the book with rapt attention – reading it back to back non stop. Do look out for it when it is released. But let me summarise some key takeaways from his book.
The conversation has become strangely one-sided. We celebrate productivity, automation, drug discovery, and coding assistants. Yet we rarely ask the uncomfortable questions.
What happens when AI becomes the world’s most persuasive manipulator?
When deepfakes become industrialized?
When AI companions replace human relationships?
When the first rung of the career ladder disappears because entry-level work is automated?
When no one—not the developer, deployer, regulator, or user—can clearly be held accountable?
These are no longer hypothetical concerns. They are increasingly documented through incident databases, litigation, labor-market research, cybersecurity investigations, and regulatory responses.
The most dangerous technologies in history were not those that were inherently evil. They were those that society adopted faster than it learned to govern.
Artificial Intelligence may ultimately become humanity’s greatest invention. Greater than the steam engine, Internet or blockchain. Interestingly the largest use case of blockchain may be authentication in a untrustable world. And the real challenge for ai is to police cyberattacks.
Or ai may well become its greatest governance challenge.
The question is no longer whether AI is good or bad.
The real question is whether we have the courage to examine both sides of the evidence before the technology reshapes our economies, institutions, and even our humanity.
We asked for rogue technologies. And not surprisingly ai topped the list. So ai bad is more important as a subject of study than ai good.
The future of AI will not be decided by engineers alone.
It will be decided by how honestly we are willing to debate it.
The role of governments may get so diminished that ai majors may wield more power than governments and have the ability to extract more tax.
Ai as a tool of extortion may make it really powerful. Just like mainstream media made money from an unholy combination of promotion and blackmail – finally keeping something out of news was more profitable than covering it on the news.
Ai is the new media ? Is it ?Activate to view larger image,
