By Om Prakash Dwivedi
The colossal shock that the famous German philosopher Martin Heidegger experienced when he first witnessed the image of the Earth taken from the moon in 1966 led him to predict the advancement of technological catastrophe in his interview, Only a God Can Save Us (1966). From capturing the image of the Earth to controlling the thoughts inside our brains, technology has travelled a long way. How else do we interpret Elon Musk’s Neuralink, a device that could decipher our thought processes? Of course, one can counter-argue by pointing out its empowering and liberating features for disabled people, but what matters more are the intentions—just as in a democratic setup, what matters is not the promises but the commitment to public welfare.
In fact, it would not be far-fetched to claim that the technological progress of planetary activities has become enmeshed with the biological progress of human beings. In the age of corporatism, technology is the new biology, data is the new religion, and politics is the laboratory in the hands of corporations, working hard to formulate and disseminate new codes of vulnerability and exploitation for an already gasping human civilization. Tottering senility and disfigured human connectivity are crude retellings of our world, exacerbated further as we slowly surrender ourselves to the grip of artificial intelligence.
Long ago, Alfred Tennyson pointed out, “The old order changeth, yielding place to new,” and today we witness the spiralling wave of technological advancements. Apparently, artificial intelligence is the new code of human intelligence. I am not arguing that technology or artificial intelligence is inherently bad, nor am I downplaying their role in alleviating human problems. My main contention, however, remains the intentions that define and control these codes. This is precisely what I term brutalism—the new form of life emerging in the age of extractive economies and the state-capital nexus.
Under brutalism, life and liveability are no longer contingent on a democratic setup but are instead dictated by the exceptional nature of the state-capital nexus. This divides the world into liveable and non-liveable zones, underpinned by the deep state’s exclusive predatory rights. The brutal living conditions in peripheral zones are symptomatic of a quotidian reality that reinforces the notion of slow violence (Nixon, 2011). Brutalism, therefore, divorces normativity from worldmaking processes. The unchecked surveillance of human lives, the proliferation of deepfakes, and the rise of social media and other digital platforms have contributed to the global decline of democracy. Data colonisation—an integral feature of artificial intelligence—has erected new borders, restricting the movement of people from the Global South in their search for better opportunities and a brighter future.
Today, discussing artificial intelligence in our everyday lives has become both inevitable and essential. It would be naïve to view modern-day politics and technology as separate entities. A mere glance at election outcomes worldwide is enough to reveal this obvious fact. Indeed, technology itself has become a battleground, shaping the fate of our global order. Co-chaired with India, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit was recently held on 10 and 11 February 2025 at the Grand Palais in Paris, France. The Summit aimed to build on the decisions taken at the Bletchley Park Summit in November 2023 and the Seoul Summit in May 2024, bringing together representatives from more than 100 countries.
While there is no denying that we must coexist with artificial intelligence, global leaders must also recognise the stark reality that AI is devoid of ideology—unlike many of them. It operates purely on the flow of data and capital. This capitalised data, therefore, is the perennial ideology of artificial intelligence. Seen from this perspective, one could argue that the Gobblesian technique is AI’s operational methodology. Conflating democracy with the datafication of technology poses serious risks to our democratic setup. Hence, the glorification of artificial intelligence demands deeper humanistic intervention. The illiberal tendencies of our so-called liberal demagogues become apparent when one examines how AI disintegrates and disconnects people under the guise of digital connections. While advancing notions of autonomy, freedom, and expression, AI simultaneously undermines these same democratic virtues. One tends to overlook AI’s implicit message: if everyone is free to access data, then everyone is equally susceptible to compromised data. Freedom has a cost, and this time, the price is the future of those already groping in darkness—rendered vulnerable and powerless.
It is nothing short of a deception to believe that we can rely on AI unless we harness our thinking abilities. It is a hallmark of undemocratic liberal technocracy to lure us with endless solutions to our problems. It is another matter that technocratic solutions provided by trained technocrats can hardly be a viable option. On 11 February, 2025, the AI summit week closed with a declaration that emphasized policies to ensure that AI is “open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy”. India needs to tread the path very cautiously. The anecdotal evidences already suggest that by selling the rhetorics of inclusivity and sustainability, the global North has already cancelled the future of much of the global South. It is no wonder that ‘some 60 countries [including India and China] signed the declaration but notably the United Kingdom and the United States did not.’ There is a greater urgency ‘for democracies to keep the lead, the risks of AI, and the economic transitions that are fast approaching—these should all be central features of the next summit”. Likewise, Toby Walsh, chief scientist at the AI Institute at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, rightly points, [at] ‘the moment, it is a two-country race between the US and China but added that the race isn’t over.’
As the domain and scope of artificial intelligence continue to multiply in our times, it is high time for India to double down on efforts to formulate a robust think tank on AI, comprising people from both sciences and humanities backgrounds. While the plan of the government to invest in AI cities sounds reasonable, but in so doing, we must not turn humans into aliens, while assigning nativity to machines. We have to live with artificial intelligence, but we still haven’t learned how to do this.
Contributing Author: Prof. Om Prakash Dwivedi is a literary critic and columnist.
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