THE SPLIT NARRATIVE

THE WEST HAS APOCALYPTIC DREAMS ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENT AI GODS AND IMMORTAL MINDS. IN INDIA, IT WAS INEVITABLE THAT WE WOULD SEE ROBOTIC ARMS PERFORMING ARTI AND GPT CLONES FOR KRISHNA

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If Artificial Intelligence (AI) was “born” at Dartmouth University in 1956, it arrived at its debutante ball in 2023. The rapid infiltration of AI into daily life and the explosive news coverage of ChatGPT, DALL-E and other large language models (LLMs) mean that everyone wants a dance with the new technologies. However, fear over job displacement, ever-present surveillance, the climate impact of computing and the ethics of using AI curb that enthusiasm. While we contemplate our future with AI, we simultaneously wrestle with the existing traditions of our cultures, either drawing on them or rejecting them in a struggle for ideological dominance. In my book, Futures of Artificial Intelligence: Perspectives from India and the US (Oxford, 2022), I discuss some of the ways that Indian and American religious life affects the reception of AI, noting that the stories we tell about AI are important because they influence how we will use it. This is important to keep in mind: while the venture capitalists and CEOs tell us that AI is inevitable and “evolves” based on its own predetermined future, in fact we can tell different narratives about AI and about how AI fits in our economies, policies, and daily lives.

Over the past 50 years, AI hype has come and gone in the US but has been largely absent in India. While the US has seen multiple “AI winters”—times when AI technologies lost their lustre and people lost faith in their entrepreneurial promises—Indian culture has focused on more concrete engagement with software technologies. Software development became a crucial Indian export, but India saw little interest in the far-reaching dreams of AI researchers in the US. Indian pop science magazines, such as Dream 2047 and