AI, an enabler of universal access, increased equity, and global influence for India

AI is a great disrupter that comes with many opportunities and dangers. The short term vision is clear. The nature of mid-term disruption is hazy and unpredictable. Long term abundance is much more possible than it has ever been in human history. The north star here is AI's potential in transforming India's welfare, equity and global influence.

What's possible by 2030?

Education and healthcare are the core of human capital, and raise productivity, speed technology adoption, and shape a country's demographic trajectory. But it's quality (learning and health outcomes), not just years in school or hospital spending, that moves long-run growth.

Education: One and a half billion Indians need education and healthcare access. Building infrastructure for education, primary and secondary education, needs decades of investments in infrastructure and human capital (teacher training at all levels from kindergarten early childhood teachers to medical school professors). Imagine if these needs disappeared and infinite levels of highly personalized education at all levels from kindergarten to PhD's and MBBS degrees was possible with personalized styles of teaching and training at near zero cost? Basic AI tutors can be universally accessible in 2026 in all regional languages (Khasi in Meghalaya anyone?) with an accelerated effort and at levels of performance and availability at higher levels than if every child or adult could afford a personal human tutor. The education potential will be limited only by the interests of the students, be they fifth class students, engineers or scientists in all domains and areas of interest. Elite education will be democratized for everyone with motivation by AI.

Healthcare: Indian citizens will need healthcare. In 2006, I pondered the dearth of health institutions in India. A simple calculation showed me that if I had thirty years and a trillion dollars to spend on getting the patient doctor ratio in India similar to that in the US, I could not do it. I could not open enough medical schools and train enough medical school educators to achieve this rather inadequate rough parity. Further investigation seemed to indicate that the only answer possible was AI physicians, AI mental health therapists, AI physical therapists, health and behavioural health coaches and other AI medical expertise. All AI expertise was the ONLY answer even with huge financial resources and yet, AI expertise would need only a tiny fraction of resources needed to have human expertise. Well before 2030 it should be possible, only for the cost of compute, to provide almost all physician and therapy expertise that might be required. Near free multi-specialty primary care, chronic disease management, health coaching, nutrition advice and navigation are all possible using AI, near free. Infinite and near free AI medical expertise and abundant use of it to prevent, manage and cure diseases early or offer continuous chronic disease management, offer lower overall health care costs and much higher standards of care provision are possible with triage up to human experts when needed, all before 2030. Of course it doesn't change the cost of medical imaging machines, drugs, tests or in-hospital surgical interventions but AI could substantially reduce the need for these services by keeping people healthier and detecting and treating disease early.

Today this is easily possible and a concentrated effort would make AI experts widely available in India at performance levels that exceed their human counterparts in the next few years, and over time customized to regional environments, customs and languages. Medical expertise delivered by AI will be near free and a billion dollars a month could deliver very high levels of primary, mental health, chronic disease management, and multi-specialty care to every Indian 24x7, in their regional language and local social context. Again, it is possible to achieve this universal access to health professional equivalent AI in near unlimited quantity well before 2030 and for the AI to pass certification as "equivalent or better quality" than median human performance levels for each of these health professions through appropriate field trials.

Access to law and legal rights, independent of financial status or education: Institutions & rule of law are both important for economic development. Protecting citizens' access to the law will require access to lawyers. AI can offer an infinite number of virtual courts and free AI lawyers for any citizen to get knowledge and access to their legal rights without years of delay today for even those who can afford access to the court system. Such a system should allow for appeals to human "courts" if citizens are unsatisfied but reduce legal backlogs and costs. Access to financial services & inclusion are important also. Many if not most Indians will need financial advice, and the lower in the economic strata they are the more they will need it to plan for their and their families future. Fortunately, those who don't have access to human wealth advisors or brokers will have substantially better advice from AI advisors.

An integrated, low friction access to essential services through a personal Aadhaar AI portal is possible: Fortunately, through Aadhaar which was implemented for identity and financial services based on that identity, near term essential services become easier to implement. India can make AI and AI based essential services a new "public utility" atop the India Stack. Beyond these essential services, a knowledge source like ChatGPT available to every Indian just as the UAE is currently considering, would do much for upleveling Indians. It would usher in an era of "mass intelligence". With the identity infrastructure and the evolving capabilities of large language models, it should be relatively easy to build essential services its citizens need very affordably. Free AI medical expertise service as in personal 24x7 doctors and AI educators and AI lawyers can be offered alongside the UPI financial services at relatively low cost. There is a very short term opportunity to build an AI centred set of services for India's population. Though naysayers will disagree this can be done at low risk, acceptance can be increased by running comparative trials to human powered services. This can be done at a fraction of the cost of today's meagre services in these areas and at 10X the capability, giving every Indian an amazing level of services in education, health, financial advice and law. Though privacy is an issue, such a portal through identity, can also enhance domestic security and reduce the threat of terrorism and crime.

Entertainment: Another area of consumer demand is consumer entertainment. Most such content will be near free and much more diverse, customized and accessible in every region and genre. Dramatically reducing the cost of services like Netflix and much more original and regional content. But entertainment is an arena private entrepreneurs and companies can handle well and near free without government services.

At the other end of the needs spectrum, National defense, cybersecurity and cyberwar and internal security will benefit dramatically as the rules of war (drones, hypersonics, space. Much driven by AI, is the new arena) change and will be primarily driven by AI competence, not gross muscle. This will be a longer transition but can start immediately.

Much of essential services will be near free, provided by governments, and relatively costless. Transitions will be difficult, chaotic, and often resisted.

2030-35+:

Of course the Indian population will need much more than these essential services, including jobs, housing, roads, transportation, energy and other infrastructure. Not all problems can be solved by AI. But AI offers India a unique opportunity in the mid-term to solve many critical needs and substantially uplevel the opportunity for its population. India can establish global leadership and new economic sectors for exports and leverage its population demographics.

AI will have a disruptive impact on people and jobs. A recent Stanford study reveals AI disproportionately impacts entry-level workers aged 22-25 in AI-exposed jobs like software engineering and customer service in the US. Given the nature of the global economy, many of these impacts cannot be avoided whether we like them or not. AI will displace jobs but significantly in my view, initially the countries that don't adopt AI will lose more jobs than those which don't. Rapid education into an AI centric workforce will be both a necessity and opportunity for some countries if AI upskilling of talent is rapidly adopted. If education is upskilled in India, and we leverage the entrepreneurial and business ecosystem in India, India will have an opportunity to be the AI services provider globally, exporting this transformation capability to the developed and developing world, creating jobs and wealth in India at least into the mid 2030's or beyond. This may be the best opportunity for India's workforce and its underemployment. Exporting AI transformation capability from India using it's established BPO and IT services industries, both of which will suffer greatly if they do not transform themselves, is a large economic opportunity for the country. Exporting the Aadhaar like identity, education, healthcare and legal capabilities mentioned above is another opportunity. Imagine the geopolitical influence benefit, at little cost in "foreign aid" of exporting free AI tutors and doctors to everyone globally! Many other AI capabilities can be built and offered on this identity infrastructure by commercial providers.

In an AI knowledgeable workforce and economy many such AI driven opportunities will emerge, as many current business sector opportunities decline. We can have AI provide an infinite number of high school and college graduates, experts in accounting, material science, chip design, manufacturing process control, structural engineering, biotechnology PhD's, an infinite number of doctors, oncologists, accountants, … you get the idea. Most labor will be centered on robotics, an area where China is progressing rapidly and is currently a leader. These will be hugely disruptive to employment and the world order but in it will be the makings of an opportunity for exports and an opportunity for India being a leading global provider by being early in adopting AI. Yes it will be disruptive to the many laborers India has available. By 2040 India should and must set up its economy to leverage this world where expertise, usually a hallmark of developed economies, will be near free and far exceeding human performance in most areas. AI will erode the value of traditional degrees by providing expertise in all these areas.

AI/self-driving driven public transit in small vehicles could reduce the investment required and dramatically increase the capacity of existing or future rights of way in passengers per hour (per meter of roadwidth) and money required for any level of passenger throughput capacity in operating costs and capital investment by as much as 5-10X, making private financing for such systems feasible while maintaining public transit prices per passenger mile. Traffic, usually a heavy tax on work time, can be substantially ameliorated. This can start well before 2030 and scaled into a hyper efficient network of transit in the 2030's, increased access to mobility at dramatically reduced costs and far less use of resources like kilograms of steel for cars per passenger mile.

None of this happens without energy fueling the economy but fusion and superhot geothermal, unrelated to AI, along with solar and wind provide the opportunities to again lead. Being the manufacturing supply chain for the new energy infrastructure, in a world shunning China, is an opportunity. Rapidly adopting new AI and robotics based housing manufacturing techniques may reduce their labor content and hence employment potential, but rapid, low cost construction with far less materials wastage may be enabled by new manufacturing and design techniques. More citizens can have houses. Experimentation is critical to explore the possibilities even if we don't commit to these approach immediately. Tradeoffs between cost, materials use and time should be critical factors to keep in mind.

A developing economy needs resources and very little has been done globally with new approaches to minerals discovery. AI driven geosciences are showing early signs of being very useful in discovering new resources like copper, iron, and other minerals, and developing better processes for minerals processing like lithium and rare earth refinement. I suspect more mineral resources can be discovered than consumed in the next fifteen years adding to national wealth and security. Others like building materials are harder to leverage with AI.

Not so simple factors:

A global view on AI is detailed at AI: Utopia or Dystopia, my blog on AI's implications in the developed world. AI will likely lead to GDP being a poor measure of national welfare. It will likely lead to a deflationary economy and many more dislocations, but opting out will be an option far worse than opting in, even with all its uncertainty. AI-enabled remote work and services may allow small towns/tier-2 cities to compete, not just global megacities-opening new ecosystems beyond traditional hubs. Expectation of low-cost or near free AI services at population scale implies new economic models but compute and energy sovereignty will become more critical than oil is today. Questions like purpose, identity, and persistence will matter more to the population than linear career planning. What will give meaning and what will people do is speculated upon in this blog. It needs much more debate, discussion, feedback, and continual updating.

For India, universal mobile access, compute availability, and public trust are critical for this vision to work. Significant infrastructure gaps must be eliminated, especially in rural and low-income areas that might hinder equitable AI deployment. And innovation must be paired with policy frameworks promoting contestability, worker support, data governance, and inclusive ecosystems. AI integration requires robust regulatory ecosystems. AI should leverage-not replace-human professionals who can provide oversight with checks and balanced integration plans until such time that comparative studies have been exhaustively run on AI alone. Frameworks around ethics, privacy, data ownership, and digital inclusion are needed to ground this vision in real institutional needs.

There will be many issues. Languages & access in Indic languages/dialects, low-end phone performance. Data governance & trust: consent, privacy, data portability, public-sector data access, and auditability of gov/AI systems. Safety & integrity including deepfakes, targeted disinformation, election security, model misuse; Workforce transition at scale: national reskilling: agricultural productivity to keep up, logistics/MSMEs, manufacturing capability, green technology and social adjustments and income distribution as AI/robots take over routine work. Large swaths of white-collar work will be automated/reshaped (law, medicine, finance), changing how these careers are pursued and credentialed. None of this will be easy but on the global stage opting out or slowing down will be a sure recipe for being left behind what technology makes possible. For every "concern" there will be many more benefits. Great abundance is possible by 2050 if one moves with agility and constant readjustment as technology drives surprises and change. Anchoring this vision of ongoing innovations needs to be coupled with immediate pilots, testing and cautious standards. The country will need to be highly adaptive, continually reassessing the technology capability trajectory.

AI can be a great equalizer. AI can be hugely deflationary as expertise based services decline to near zero cost and are available in infinite quantities allowing for a world of abundance. As Elon Musk wrote in a recent post: "There will be universal high income. Everyone will have the best medical care, food, home, transport and everything else. Sustainable abundance". But getting there will be hard and chaotic. There can be near-term free essential services and over time, job creation through exporting this no transformation capability, mid-term uncomfortable disruption, and long-term reduced need to work-applied explicitly to India's population.This may be a while in coming but it is the direction we can go and get India a sustainable global competitive advantage for the next two decades. Winning in AI (and allied technology like fusion) confers outsized economic & strategic power; India's democracy with its demographics can lead. Geopolitics will be complex and less predictable as chaos and change affect every society and local politics globally as there are more have's and have-not's. The future will arrive very unevenly.

The future is ours to make with many acts of commission and action needed. Errors of omission and inaction could be catastrophic.

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