iSPIRT: 'If we play AI right, it'll lift many Indians out of poverty', and into health and education

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00:00We're going to turn now to the co-founder of the Indian Software Products Industry Roundtable,

00:06the iSpirit Foundation, Sharad Sharma. Thanks for being with us. You've known the age of the floppy

00:14disk, and now you know the age of artificial intelligence. And what's been interesting in

00:19the last minutes listening to Kemi is we seem to be having this sort of schizophrenic kind

00:24of conversation. On the one hand, we're like, this is great. How fast can we go to make this stuff?

00:32And on the other hand, we're wondering, does humanity know what it's doing? Are we

00:37creating the tools of our own downfall? Does AI keep you up at night?

00:42It does. And the reason both of those aspects are important is because if you play AI right,

00:50it will lift many Indians out of poverty. It will give them better health. It will let

00:57our students study better and learn better. But on the other hand, if we don't do AI well,

01:04and we don't have all the safety provisions that we need, then we will have children who

01:10will be affected by AI pornography, AI gambling, AI gaming, and we'll have a lost generation.

01:16And the Indian lost generation is a big generation. We had 23 million babies born last

01:20year. We have the largest number of under 15-year-olds in the world. So we have to worry

01:28about both the opportunity and the threats at a scale that no other country has to worry about.

01:34And the services sector powers the Indian economy right now.

01:39I would say yes.

01:40And so is this going to be a job destructor?

01:43It could be. And on the other hand, it could enable people to fulfil their best potential,

01:49right? And so you could have many outcomes in the future. And I think the only way we can play this

01:58is that luckily for us, India did have a revolution in digital world, as some of you may

02:04know. India has been very successful in the last 15 years in creating digital infrastructure that's

02:11brought everybody into the system. So India is a unique country because it's data rich even before

02:17it's economically rich. And as you know, AI is powered by data, right? So our health data can

02:24inform how people can be healthier in the future. Our education data can inform how people can

02:30study and learn more effectively. Our financial data, because we've had a huge revolution in

02:36financial services in India, that can inform how small businesses can be given loans in a way that

02:42is not possible to give right now. So AI offers us, the next generation of AI will offer us many

02:49opportunities. Why? Because that would be built on real data. Currently, AI is built on public data.

02:56That's also real, but it's available to everybody. Now, tomorrow's AI...

03:00Some say available thanks to stealing people's data.

03:03Perhaps, and therefore the next set of data is going to be about health records of hundreds of

03:08millions of people. Can you use it for AI in a privacy preserving way? Can you use people's

03:15spending patterns, that data in a privacy preserving way? Can you do that for education

03:21in a privacy preserving way? And India has built the deep, we call it digital public infrastructure

03:27that allows this to happen in a privacy preserving way. And because of that,

03:32India is going to unlock continental data sets in a way that no other country is able to do,

03:38or no other place is able to do right now. So the future of AI is actually going to depend

03:43on those kinds of data sets and the kind of AI that emerges from it.

03:48And that's going to determine what world will see as AI in the future.

03:53How do you prevent it from becoming the dream of any police state,

03:58like a dystopian movie like Minority Report?

04:01In fact, that is a very important issue. So just the way we talk about security,

04:05the most important word in the future is going to be privacy. And most people don't appreciate

04:10that the first country to make privacy a fundamental right was in India. Our Supreme

04:18Court gave a 9-0 judgment, which cannot be overturned easily in the future, saying privacy

04:24is a fundamental right. We have the biggest system for private data sharing. So in Europe,

04:30you have this idea that personal data, private data can only be shared with consent. I don't

04:35know, many people may not know that India's consent system is an electronic system. It's open,

04:42it's revocable, it's granular, it's auditable, it's notified and it's secure, organs we call it.

04:48It runs at 120 million consents a year today. It will end this year with 600 million consents

04:57this year. So therefore, the scale at which we are able to build privacy into the techno legal

05:04system, what is India's specialization is that we use technology and policy, public technology,

05:12public policy, coming together to protect Indian citizens from overreach by companies

05:18or overreach by the state. Yeah, because we saw with DeepSeek, this large language model put out

05:25on the cheap by the Chinese, as we heard Peter O'Brien say, there are reasons to hope, but also

05:31reasons to worry when you type in things like Tiananmen Square, nothing comes out. How do you

05:36make it so that if you type in IOTA, for instance, which is something contested in India over what

05:40happened there, that your large language model isn't going to have a bias? Look, even in DeepSeek,

05:46if you install it on your own computer, you can get whatever information that you want,

05:53because all the controls are in the layers above, which can be stripped away.

05:57Remember, all these AI models are eminently shareable. One of the misconceptions that we

06:03had with AI is that we could put a regime that would prevent proliferation of AI models.

06:10That's not true, because AI model after it's been trained in the end is set of model weights,

06:16and those model weights can be put on a USB and shared with everybody. That's what you can do

06:21with DeepSeek as well. So when you install DeepSeek, don't use it as a service, but install

06:27it on your own computer and run it, then it will give you the stuff that it has been truly trained

06:34on without the censorship that has been added on later.

06:37So, Sharad Sharma, we heard our correspondent there allude to it. You have the Indian Prime

06:44Minister Narendra Modi coming to Paris. There's this nail biting over what will be in the final

06:49joint declaration when it comes to AI safety. Then Narendra Modi goes on to Washington.

06:55And we know that these days, Donald Trump likes to rip up international treaties.

07:00At the end of the day, is it the global regulation that wins,

07:04or is it the move fast and break things crowd that win the argument?

07:09I think there are two competing views on AI. One is that, will it be a source of state power?

07:19The Chinese and the Americans would like it to be a part of state power. And if indeed that

07:26is the winning paradigm, then India, and I would say even France, would want to have strategic

07:32autonomy in AI, because we would not like to be client states of either side. The second view is

07:40that no, AI will proliferate. It will be hundreds and thousands of fireflies lighting up the sky.

07:48That's what they promised with the internet. It didn't happen that way. Instead,

07:52concentration of power we have in Silicon Valley.

07:54Therefore, if you hear the India stack story, or the DPI story, that is the story of India.

08:01India has taken, what was internet? Internet was flow of data packets, flow of messages,

08:08email messages, TCP, IP, if you know protocols, SMTP, and the last one is the flow of web content.

08:17India made flow of people, money, and information as part of public infrastructure,

08:24digital public infrastructure. Companies like Microsoft and Alphabet,

08:29the parent company of Google, run our world. No, in India, our payment system, which is a

08:35digital public infrastructure, Google is a big player, but it runs it on Indian terms.

08:41See, this is what I think is the big learning for Europe, that if you really want to shape market

08:48behavior, you cannot in the digital world shape it with one hand. Think of it as you are shaping

08:55clay on a potter's wheel. Can you do it with one hand? You can't. You need two hands. The two hands

09:00are public policy and public technology. Now, Europe used to be the epicenter of public

09:06technology. That has dissipated. US used to have lots of public technology. I would submit to you

09:12that the largest pool of public technologies today are sitting in Bangalore, the city I am from.

09:18And so, therefore, today, if you really want to get good outcomes, you need two hands,

09:24public technology and public policy. That is what will shape the digital and the AI future of the

09:31world. And that is called techno-legal regulation. That is the contribution of India to the discourse

09:37about what the future of digital and future of AI will be in the coming year. And if J.D. Vance,

09:43who's representing the United States, doesn't want to sign on, you're saying the Indians and the

09:48French and whoever else will do it. India's digital revolution has managed to prevent Alibaba from

09:56running our systems and has prevented the big tech in the US from running our systems. And we

10:01have done it in a way, for example, where some of our systems like MOSIP are in 26 countries. 943

10:09million citizens are signed up to use it. Why? Because it's not weaponizable. Privacy is built in.

10:17It has techno-legal regulation. So, there is a new philosophy that is emerging. Why am I here in

10:24France? Because originally this philosophy was the French philosophy. It used to be called digital

10:30commons and data commons. However, that philosophy was overturned by the way from Silicon Valley.

10:42In India, we learned from that. We figured out how to keep it alive and run it at scale and we

10:48are doing it. And therefore, that has become the last bastion where you can see this working,

10:54where the values of the internet are still operative and will probably become stronger

10:59as we go forward. Stronger as we go forward. Sharad Sharma, I want to thank you so much for

11:03being with us here on France 24. Thanks again, Kemi Knight with that full coverage, which again

11:08continues through to next Tuesday with that AI summit coming up. Stay with us, top of the hour,

11:12more news and then the France 24 debate. And how does Ukraine these days handle Donald Trump?

11:19That's the question we've been posing to you on the hashtag F24 debate.

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