27 July 2025

India’s ancient knowledge could save the future of AI. Build with wisdom, not just engineering


I am frequently asked, “Do you believe artificial intelligence will take over humans one day?” It’s a substantial question, and I used to provide the standard responses: that AI would automate some work, that we require robust ethics, and that creativity remains a human advantage. However, I respond differently now. Because something more is on the move. What’s happening today in AI labs — at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, and countless high-flying startups — is not merely about replacing humans. It’s about creating something completely new.

Big tech is not merely writing code or constructing tools. It’s, unwittingly or otherwise, birthing a new form of intelligence — one that will be able to become smarter, quicker, and maybe even more powerful than us when it comes to designing the world. It sounds sensational, perhaps, but the reality is that the first non-human mind might be under development. The machines being created now don’t merely execute instructions. They learn, develop, and change. And one day, they might start thinking in ways that we can’t even dream of.

It’s like carving a new life form — but we don’t yet know if it’s going to be an angel or a devil. At the centre of all this is not emotions or consciousness — it’s something much simpler, and yet stronger: calculation. In every corner of the globe, governments and businesses are investing trillions of dollars in the construction of gigantic computing complexes. They are no longer simply “data centres”. They are akin to the digital nervous systems of an imagined future being: thousands of processors wired together, memory chips, cooling apparatus, and high-speed interconnects.

They cooperate around the clock, training AI models that now compose, sketch, code, and even reason. This isn’t evolution by nature but by money. Species in biology change slowly, over millions of years, through experimentation and error. But this new mind — let’s refer to it as the Digital Brain — is being constructed on fast-forward. This brain does not reside within a skull. It inhabits industrial parks, server farms, and cloud networks. Its blood is electricity. Its learning is not from experience but from data tokens, simulations, and mathematical optimisation.

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