C Wright Mills, the American sociologist and author of the two classics White Collar: The American Middle Classes and The Power Elite, often talked about the ‘great celebration’. He used the term to refer to the Eisenhower era, when America was celebrating itself not only as a victor from a world war, but also as a great democracy.
Mills noted that while one tended to emphasise the official America, one tended to forget the silences, the doubts, the distances created by such a term. His idea of the great celebration can be used in the Indian context. When we talk about the Union government today, we are talking about a great celebration.
In this context, one has to emphasise three things. Modi’s achievement in winning electorally for the third time has given him a sense of permanence while the iconic pictures of Indira Gandhi or Jawaharlal Nehru fade.
The second point is that Modi is seen as an astute person who has managed to innovate and even ‘tame’ Trump on tariff and trade.
And the third point is the artificial intelligence summit recently held in Delhi, which emphasised a new tryst of destiny between corporate power and the political elite.
In this context, one has to ask whether AI as a great celebration can be understood as it is, or whether it needs something more. In terms of its silences, availability of alternatives and the political economy, AI has to be reworked to be understood. There is a necessity for dissent and critical imagination, and there is a silence about it.
One of the best ways of trying to understand this is to look at the national movement, which was pluralistic, dialogical and deeply experimental. It included arguments from the theosophists, the Marxists, the Gandhians. It created a plurality that helped shape the imagination. Gandhi was an exemplar of this tremendous sense of experimentation.
What kind of epistemology underlies AI and how does one reflect on it? One has to ask whether AI is restrictive or open-ended in terms of information, and the consequences of the definitions it offers to the theory of freedom.
The second exemplar I want to cite is C V Raman, who not only won the first Nobel Prize in physics for India, but was, in a deep and fundamental way, an original man. When asked to open chemical laboratories of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, he said they were tombs for burying scientific instruments.
What one wants to emphasise here is not the animosity, but the sense of autonomy. Raman would say he would rather find out one more property of a diamond than worry about its industrial uses. He kept a certain distance between government and science. How does one create a dialogue, a distance, a plurality between government and science? Where does autonomy stand in the question of AI? Who are the dissenters? Where are the pluralists of the day?
The last exemplar I want to cite is Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who developed many of his theories when still at the Presidency College in Madras. He tried to hold on to these theories during his Cambridge years, when Arthur Eddington and others were battering him. Chandrasekhar survived to win another Nobel in physics. What one has to understand here is the autonomy, the confidence, and the quiet non-violent way in which he proceeded with an alternative way of thinking.
AI needs such plurality. The question is, how do we create this? One has to worry about a set of social experiments. We need exemplars who are dissenters, to show us alternative ways of thinking.
The second question is: what is the epistemological status of AI? Why does it not have corresponding ethical experiments, which are required so that AI does not get contaminated by power?
AI, which today is a corporate initiative, has to be a democratic initiative tomorrow. There has to be a democracy of knowledge systems. One has to have a notion of cognitive democracy. AI can help us create the possibilities of a new kind of experimental democracy.
What I want to emphasise is not so much the technical logic of experimentation, but the social experimentation that goes into science. Gandhi emphasised this in the national movement. In a similar way, we need local experimentation, local responses to technology.
The second example I want to suggest is that of the knowledge panchayat. Debates on science policy tend to be exotic and full of expertise. There seems to be little place for the ordinary person. The knowledge panchayat would allow ordinary people to express their ideas about, say, AI—their articulation of their own interests. AI must create around itself a nest of knowledge panchayats that create the possibilities of critique, openness and transparency.
The third example is that we need an ethics centre. Ethics in the old sense will not do when we are dealing with AI. We need a research centre completely autonomous of government, which raises the whole question of ethics and AI as a new kind of scientific responsibility. The idea of Pugwash can no longer be restricted to nuclear energy; it has to spread to new technologies. The kind of debate that has taken place in biotechnology has to now take place in AI too.
One also has to look at the militarisation of AI. How do peace groups react to its potential aspects? This kind of transparency would add much to the imagination of India as a new kind of democracy.
AI is both text and pretext for the new democratic imagination. It can become the possibility of a new non-violent science. But for that, one needs new kinds of professionalism, new kinds of ethics, and a new way of looking at science as a way of creating life.
This brings us to livelihood. What does AI offer in terms of jobs? Is there an obsolescence of old livelihoods? What is the measure of obsolescence? What is AI capable of eliminating? There is a silence about these questions. What is frightening is the celebration of AI in the presence of ignorance of the issues we are confronting.
AI is not just a philosophical or ethical issue. It becomes an opportunity for a new kind of social creativity. It allows democracy not just to be about representative issues, but about a creative imagination. The future becomes very important. AI and futuristics are deeply correlated. Democracy has to be equally future-sensitive. Democracy, epistemology, freedom—all become terms within which we capture the imagination of the subject.
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)