'Site of aspiration and exploitation', what India needs to guard in AI growth path, Pg14

Key Highlights:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) is widely adopted by countries like India as a route to economic growth and national power.
• The AI Resist List project documents global efforts to challenge AI's influence across labor, data extraction, surveillance, and digital infrastructure.
• India is identified as both a site of aspiration and exploitation within the global AI power structure.
• Concerns exist regarding the costs of AI ambition borne by workers, communities, and public resources.
• India's presence across all pillars of AI power (labour, infrastructure, surveillance, data, and narrative) highlights its complex role.

Detailed Insights:

• The narrative of AI as a national imperative is driven by the allure of technological shortcuts for development.
• The AI Arms Race fosters competition for AI dominance, often obscuring accountability issues.
• The "AI as development" framing is a narrative power, one of four pillars identified by the AI Resist List.
• AI adoption decisions are influenced by defence interests, surveillance state consolidation, and investor capture of public infrastructure.
• India provides a significant invisible workforce for AI systems and hosts numerous data centers.
• Data centers consume vast water and electricity, impacting resource-stressed regions and local communities.
• Surveillance technologies and data from Digital India raise concerns about oversight and consent.
• AI's global supply chains are built on extractive and unequal relationships, reflecting historical capital hierarchies.
• Policymakers must assess who bears the costs and who receives the benefits of AI projects.
• Achievable AI sovereignty involves the capacity to regulate, audit, and refuse, rather than full technological independence.

Key Concepts Involved:

• AI Resist List: A project documenting global efforts to challenge and reshape AI's growing influence.
• AI Arms Race: The competitive pursuit of AI dominance among nations, particularly the US and China.
• Strategic Autonomy (in AI): A nation's capacity to develop, deploy, and govern AI technologies independently.
• Digital India: A government program to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy.