India’s approach as the fourth highest rated AI power in the world today in AI vibrancy rankings has tended to lean towards the conservative European model of backing progress but with controls lest the technology causes social disruptions through cybercrimes and deep fakes that are AI’s deleterious aspects that PM Modi brought up at the summit
A seat at the head table of the global AI Action summit is not so much a privilege as an essential function for an emerging AI player like India in the current era when to be alarmist over artificial intelligence is fashionable. At a time when all leading nations must forge a consensus on the regulation and utilisation of AI for the common good to ensure that it enriches lives rather than imperil them, India and France acted as the voice of reason in ensuring the technology builds confidence in the people and, more importantly, is safe.
With the two competing superpowers United States and China in the race and representing the two extremes of liberalisation and tight regulation for total control, India’s call for a collective approach through Prime Minister Narendra Modi to setting standards for AI that will be for the benefit of everyone, particularly the Global South that cannot afford the billions of dollars of investment called for in developing the technology, makes the most sense.
The great difficulty now is that no one knows, or has gauged, fully what are AI’s benefits and dangers. Will it develop to an extent that it will make most human beings jobless or become a tool in the hands of the oligarchs who could potentially destroy the world that humans have harnessed and built? There are three models that are currently taking aim at AI — the US’s most liberal way with no controls, Europe’s desire to regulate Big Tech to retain control over its bad effects and China’s iron grip on technology to dictate how it will progress.
India’s approach as the fourth highest rated AI power in the world today in AI vibrancy rankings has tended to lean towards the conservative European model of backing progress but with controls lest the technology causes social disruptions through cybercrimes and deep fakes that are AI’s deleterious aspects that PM Modi brought up at the summit.
PM Modi’s admission that the Global South is lacking the capabilities in computing power, energy to drive the programmes, talent, data and the financial resources reflects a reality that the AI leaders like the US and the challenger China will probably not bother about. Sharing resources in high tech areas is going to be a touchy issue going forward as the US already has placed embargoes on export of the most powerful chips and China strives to build a fortress against Western pressures and develops its own programmes.
So complex are the different stands on AI control that the US and the UK did not sign the joint communique, which spells out the foundation for open-sourced sharing of technology, even as China railed against US’s Vice-President J.D. Vance’s warning that authoritarian regimes were seeking to use AI for increased control over citizens. The good intentions of France and India to chair an important summit on AI, the third in the series that began two years ago, may amount to little though China does assert that it advocates open-source AI tech, and indeed the revolutionary DeepSeek is an example of this.
Consensus may have been hard to achieve in the globally fragmented approach to AI. However, the first leg of Mr Modi’s trip to France and the US was testimony to the ideal state of India-France ties that may have gone a step further in the bilateral meeting between French President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Modi in Marseilles. France reiterating its support for a permanent seat for India in the Security Council is just one point among many that reinforces the strong relationship.
