India is a great power and a nation steadily ascending to newer heights of power and prestige. Yet this is not enough. It must vastly increase its leverage to negotiate a world of great powers unhinged from any coherent order. India is a nation of nearly one and a half billion souls, many of them highly vulnerable, whose well-being is inseparably tied to the national good. It is therefore the duty of public intellectuals to identify what strengthens the nation and what weakens it, and to build public support around these questions.
Equally critical is the fact that artificial intelligence is constructing entirely new templates that script human life itself, pushing older templates into the background. These changes are creating colossal opportunities and are likely to generate equally unimaginable crises; the early signals are already highly disruptive. A country like India must consciously negotiate this unprecedented transition to mitigate its disruptions and reap the benefits of a revolution of scale unparalleled in human history.
Niraj Kumar Jha
