Ten percent. That is Geoffrey Hinton’s estimate of the possibility that artificial intelligence could eventually wipe out humanity. An oddly casual number, you’d think. The sort we may usually attach to the likelihood that it will rain at a picnic, or something as unconsequential. But Hinton is the ‘Godfather of AI’, a Nobel in Physics. That may not make him immune to the West’s millenarist cultural tendency to lapse into doomsday scenarios. But you can’t accuse him of not knowing how to measure things.
Humanity has for long fixed its dread of being annihilated on something that surpasses it in force. World religions have plenty of candidates. The post-Enlightenment version is being rendered extinct by an entity that exceeds our powers to think. The most compelling foe is one we build ourselves—a Frankenstein’s monster with brains. Somewhere it captures our faint sense of guilt for screwing up the planet. We have made bombs powerful enough to destroy ourselves, but bombs don’t suddenly develop a will.
AI fits the bill. It is a black box even to its creators. It’s learning faster, much faster, than any understanding we may evolve about how it is doing so.
But science also gives us Occam’s razor, a principle that bids us to settle for simpler explanations when they suffice. A Bhakti poet would tell us to search within ourselves for the enemy. One look around the globe suffices to tell you we need no help from AI. Donald Trump’s brain, decoding which may win someone a Nobel one day, could chew up Anthropic’s latest offering.
A touch of order was restored in New Delhi this week. The calm, chatty, busy air of an Oriental bazaar filled the pleasant September air. Everyone was happily discussing trade. That is the way it ought to be in a free market, a truly free market. Competition is an unruly word for what is actually the hum of unfettered exchange, not a market silenced by a bully but one where everyone has a stall and all share a common stake in peace and absence of turbulence. For all of us plunged into intimations of anarchy and disequilibrium, the comforting summit vocabulary was all there: a more multipolar world, greater representation in global institutions, more freedom over trade and finance, less dependence on arrangements created when much of today’s Global South had very little say in making them.
If you go back to its prehistory, BRICS is in many ways the brainchild of Yevgeny Primakov, former Russian premier who was once described as ‘the spy who came in from the cold war’. Back in the 1990s, thinking strategically in the gloom of the Yeltsin years, the then foreign minister had sketched an alternative to the world that everyone then took for granted, one where history had ended with America as the winner. The Primakov Doctrine laid out all its essential features—multipolarity, the Eurasian continuum, the strategic partnerships that would redistribute power across the globe. Western analysts then were already issuing warnings about the coming together of Russia, China and Iran.
It is fascinating now to see how prescient he was, how much of the language and vision survives practically intact after three decades. And the dramatis personae, as he saw it. India happened to gain a permanent centrality as a founding member. Its traditional strategic autonomy was a perfect fit; it may have wavered, never strayed. And here in New Delhi, all the pieces of the chess board were in alignment.
Narendra Modi was seen in a tight handshake with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Vladimir Putin, the one who actually operationalised Primakov’s doctrine, walking his judoka walk. Xi Jinping was back in India after seven years, sitting down with Modi for a bilateral that not many would have bet their last yuan on happening. Even that frame was not entirely inconceivable. For all of the lingering distrust from the unsettled boundary question and the rest of complicated fine print of Sino-Indian strategic competition, the two sides never disengaged—and have over time accomplished a prudent transfer of focus to economic ties.
The real coup may yet be that backlit photograph of Pezeshkian and MBZ, the crown prince of UAE, sitting side by side. BRICS is hardly a neat club. Its members have competing interests. It is not NATO, nor the European Union. There is no common army or foreign policy. These two are actually at war. But here they were. At a table for two, on the sidelines. Proof that dialogue always gives you a chance, if you give it a chance. The New Delhi Declaration gave it formal shape. Its language touched everyone’s concerns: sovereignty, territorial integrity, peaceful settlement of disputes. There were references to terrorism, conflict, trade, finance, technology and the need for countries to work together without being forced into somebody else’s hierarchy.
India has concerns over that point. Beijing is seen to be a dominant presence in BRICS and the partly overlapping Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). But only mature participation can allay those, not abstinence. If BRICS brings multipolarity outside of it, New Delhi’s presence ensures multipolarity within. That’s an expression of the founding vision, not antithetical to it, as long as we bring our moral stature to the table and stand as a guardian for the Global South. This must be about redistribution of power, not a new power grab by global arrivistes.
The American bet on India has been the converse of this story. Washington spent years encouraging India to become a major alternative to China — economically, technologically and strategically. China-plus-one, resilient supply chains, manufacturing moving out of China. Then came tariffs and trade friction! There is an obvious awkwardness in asking India to become an alternative to China while making it harder for Indian goods to enter the American market.
In an ideal world, geopolitics would not be like a problem in quantum physics that only AI can solve! In the world we have, talking to all sides is a good option—to Pezeshkian and Putin and Xi, to the Americans, perhaps even to Pakistan at some stage so that we could perchance revive our own little SAARC, a grouping that would contain a good 21 per cent of the world population, in case you forgot. If BRICS shows us anything, it’s the creative potential of dialogue. In an ideal future, neither trade lines nor air corridors should have to bypass a country next door.
Two days before the summit came a small, almost incidental sign of a change in temperature off-stage. A group of senior journalists from People’s Daily visited our office. It was not a diplomatic event—journalists are certainly not governments. But after years in which even ordinary India-China conversations had acquired a certain stiffness, there was a curiosity in the interaction that was noticeable. Perhaps it meant nothing. Perhaps it meant a ten per cent chance at a better world.
Read all columns by Santwana Bhattacharya
Santwana Bhattacharya
Editor, The New Indian Express
