The artificially intelligent nation-state: Data-hungry, biased tech could prove costly for India

A spectre is haunting the world: the spectre of Artificial Intelligence. Hardly a day passes by without some celebration of the potential of AI to usher in a new utopia or a clarion call for action on the part of governments, corporations and other stakeholders to mitigate the serious risks it poses to humanity.

While larger philosophical debates about the appropriateness of the term AI itself, the nature of intelligence, the existential dangers of AI and the feasibility of attaining the holy grail of Artificial General Intelligence that surpass human cognitive abilities, AI is already a reality. It is transforming our lives in routine and banal ways as well as in ways that we cannot perhaps quite fathom.

What does AI mean for the nation-state? Arguably, the most significant aspect of the impact of AI is that it will massively expand the surveillance capabilities of the modern nation-state, a process that is already underway in a number of societies. French historian Michel Foucault’s seminal work on the relationship between power and knowledge has shown how the logic of surveillance is central to the emergence of the Western nation-state and all the institutions of modern life, from the prison to the hospital and the school to the office.

Well before the new...

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