The race in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) appears to be focused on coding, but it is the philosophical framework that will determine the winner. India is winning in neither. By ignoring its philosophical heritage, if India continues to treat AI as an issue of coding and scale — a glorified word processor and a supply chain device — it risks becoming another call centre capital wielding no influence over AI’s future deployment.
Founded by ex-Open AI and Google researchers, Perplexity AI used human annotators and multilingual evaluation to fix the biases in DeepSeek without affecting its core reasoning. Built for $6 million (versus GPT-4’s $100 million), DeepSeek is efficient and open source. Perplexity has released it with the symbol of a free-floating whale, establishing that the programmer’s intent matters more, if not as much, as its capabilities. And who is to say if a conservative Elon Musk’s Grok fairly represents liberal views?
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The fear of unbridled AI is neither new nor trivial. The Frankenstein complex of a robot turning on its creator, detailed in Mary Shelley’s 1818 book, was made explicit in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872). Alan Turing in 1951 warned: “At some stage, therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control.” Isaac Asimov, Stephen Hawking, Yoshua Bengio and Elon Musk have all voiced concerns. Yuval Noah Harari warned against AI’s looming ability to manipulate humans, the rise of “dataism”, and the existential threat to humanity. The risks are threefold and premised on the following questions: Who controls the AI; what humanistic values does it align to; and will it have an intelligence explosion that resists a human reset?
Humanity is at an inflexion point — we are trying to embed human ideals into machine learning. First, we need consensus. We need to confront the inflexibilities of our dogmas. Enhancing capabilities, the current preoccupation, is a phantasmagoria.
Like our clunkiest mobile phones, each AI version will soon become obsolete. Behind the scenes, modern AI leadership is seeking to understand, through different philosophical schools, the larger questions of collective consciousness that will outlast us all.
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Does AI have consciousness, sentience or a mind-body connection? Which humanistic ideals are non-negotiable? Wit, uniquely human, naturalises speech. Must AI suffer to empathise, and should it then have rights? Yale Social Robotic Lab’s 2020 study found that people equate human and robot abuse but blame robots if they resist. How will our supremacist biases unfold? If ultimate wisdom merges with ultimate compassion, should AI be limited at all?
Positivists favour empirical data, neo-positivists accommodate for human error, constructivists lean into data control, criticalists consider inequality, anti-colonialists want to undo a skewed narrative, and pragmatists just want real-world solutions. Before we come up with the Mangalyaan response to NASA in AI terms, we have to ask why Indians are not engaged in shaping its cosmology.
Had India spent the last 15 years applying our dialectical models rather than using our philosophical heritage to otherise, we would have some voice in the unfolding dialogue. The Nalanda traditions of debate, the syllogisms of master logicians and ethicists such as Samantabhadra, Nagarjuna, Dharmakirti, Dignaga, Vasubandhu lay out the conditioned and unconditioned factors of conscious existence. Sankhya — kinds of perception — nyaya khyatis or theories of error in knowledge could be instructive. Our linguistic diversity and subcultures can vitally inform precision in large language modelling.
We have missed the bus, but can still hop on if we set aside ideological schisms. This openness to the parsing of what consciousness, sentience and truth can potentially mean is our unique cultural predisposition, one that China can no longer harness from within its culture of structural rigidity.
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Murray Shanahan, Principal Research Scientist at Google DeepMind and Professor of Cognitive Robotics, writes: “It is surely the height of anthropocentric thinking to suppose that the story of matter in this corner of the universe climaxes with human society and the myriad living brains embedded in it, marvellous as they are. Perhaps matter still has a long way to go on the scale of complexity. Perhaps there are forms of consciousness yet to arise that are, in some sense, superior to our own. Should we recoil from this prospect or rejoice in it? Can we even make sense of such an idea?”
The fundamentals of both philosophical and scientific frameworks are a deep respect for and pursuit of the unknown. The common ground is India, if we can recognise it.
Tara Das is an author, therapist, AI ethicist and co-founder of a global AI philosophy focus group
