Dr John Mohan Razu
1. Science is known for inventions and discoveries over centuries. We are in the 21st Century, which is marked by zenith of growth and development. The world we live and all that consists are used to live is part of scientific innovations and in that technology plays a major. Dominant, and critical role. It is to be recognised and acknowledged that science and its tool technology have taken us to a level which is beyond our comprehension. The level that we are-in presently and the knowledge that we have received through science and technology have been mind-boggling and earth-shattering.
AI is changing the landscape of everything and all facets of our life and living. Following the recent announcements by software giants, most of the code will be machine-generated by 2040, indicating fewer human hiring in organisation and institutions of varied kinds. The role of science and software is to innovate and design. In such a context, AI and Machine Learning (ML) would take over learning setting technologies have now translated as ‘tools and weapons’ necessary for every industry and organisation, be it health care, finance, and content creation.
2. Scientific innovations and technological developments are geared towards human being for the welfare and well-being. The foundation value for all that the humans have reached in science and theology revolves around ‘good’ to reducing monotony and boredom—considered as ‘advancement in human life and living’. Every progress stems out of humanity’s wellbeing and betterment. Therefore, AI is a design—not destiny. Those engaged in translating AI concept into reality say that what they striving for is for humanity.
Major corporations that are engaged in the production of capital-intensive AI say that ‘human interests at the forefront of the technology’s rapid integration into daily life.’ On these lines, Mozilla Foundation Executive Director Nabiha Syed said in an emailed statement that “The system shaping our m lives must be powered by people, open to design, and fuelled by imagination.” AI has been embraced as a productivity booster in fields of engineering, medicine, a range of visuals, speech, speech, language, academic research and hearing impairments. In the due course of time AI would penetrate into other areas as well.
Artificial Intelligence enables those involved in humanitarian concerns like translating important documents for refugees and migrants. For instance, AI also facilitates the farmers to detecting pests destroying their crops. At the same time, others look at AI’s entry is actually improving their quality of life. While others point out that real harms exist for children turning to AI chat box for companionship. AI generated deepfake videos contribute to the online spread of misinformation and disinformation. For example, Trump in his recent UN Assembly described “… ‘climate change’ is the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world in my opinion.” “All of these predictions made by the UN and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance.”
3. Take for instance, teacher nowadays rely on AI chatbots to devise lesson plan, which does not engage in effective learning experience. As of now AI has caught the attention of educator. The data shows that majority of teachers are using AI in their teaching activities such as lesson planning and preparations. Since AI comes to the aid of teachers, they can generate detailed lesson plans featuring learning objective, materials, activities, assessments, extension activities and homework tasks in a matter of second, otherwise, they should have spent long hours.
For research work nowadays AI is used for data activities for collecting and analysing activities. At the same time, we hear that when we take the majority who say that they found AI-generated lesson plans to be decidedly boring, traditional and uninspiring. When teachers choose to use these tools, for preparing their lessons, they risk relying on technology, not designed to enhance, aid or improve teaching and learning skills. It has also been observed that those tools the teachers depend too much in lesson preparations, not designed enhancing, aiding and improving teaching and learning, eventually resulting in over-dependence on AI—not good. This is the trend, which should be taken seriously.
For the last two-century each wave of new technology and innovation has carried with fear that machines would take away people’s livelihood. Right from industrial revolution to that of the recent technological revolution we have been witnessing when the transition takes place there are those who don’t fall within the changes would be made redundant. The current wave would require cognitive roles like coding, medical diagnosis, creative content, recruitment, customer support—all would be carried out with automation. Even in the sectors robotics would take over manual tasks such as warehouse picking, surgery assistance, and food preparation face the risk of being automated.
All these stupendous shifts and transitions would result as McKinsey report estimates that 2030, automation could replace up to 30% of hours worked in the US, forcing 12 million workers to shift roles. The ILO warns the impact could even be more severe in India, with nearly 70% of existing jobs at high risk from AI and automation. At the same time along with technology many occupations will require people to work. AI and robotics are like to add net jobs. Nonetheless the semi-skilled and unskilled in India in the meantime to become skilled.
4. In such fast-changing political economy, we should identify those who controls the world. Certainly, they are not politicians, but are the capitalists. We live in a world of globalisation, although we observe parallelly the presence of de-globalisation. However, in an era of kaleidoscopic capitalism those in the field of AI are investing huge sums in terms of millions and billions in R&D. A few oligopolistic transnational corporations having huge capital are now competing with each other as AI is gaining momentum across the world.
Google proposed $15 billion investment to build a large AI and infrastructure project in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh. India is going to become ag global hub in AI development. Other MNCs will follow Google into India. The US produces 820,000 STEM (science, technology, engineering, maths) graduates per year, insufficient to cope up with the growing demand, while China produces 3.5 million per year, but majority of them do not speak good English, thus posing security issues which TNCs want to avoid.
India produces 2.5 million graduates annually with possible English skills, and has a target of 18nmillion by 2027. It is practically impossible as it would erode quality. Every country wants to grab the growing demand for AI investments as it boosts FDI. In such a context one can say that globalisation is not dead, but alive and kicking, despite the rhetoric of deglobalisation, where capital and skill exist. At the same time AI requires apart from the huge capital, physical infrastructure—power, transmission lines, data centres, international cable connections, fibre networks, and secure data storage.
5. Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners of the 2025 Nobel economics prize which went to Joel Mokye, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt for having explained innovation driven economic growth. Mokyr was honoured for his work on ‘prerequisite for sustained growth through technological progress’, while Aghion and Peter Hewitt won for having established the “theory of sustained growth through creative destruction”. Joseph Schumpeter was an influential 20th Century Austrian economist known for popularising the concept of “creative destruction”.
He argued that economic growth is driven by innovations through disrupting the existing markets but leading to new industries and development as a continuous process of innovation and change. Aghion and Hewitts’s original articles dates back to 1992 and Mokyr’s seminal work published in 1998, when AI has pushed the frontiers of technology to a realm of unknown-unknown. The Academy skirted the huge body of work on a volatile subject when globalisation and de-globalisation hounded by politics retreating, disappearing, and reappearing jolting the world at large.
Two decades later, such shocks have acquired a hitherto unknown scale, tempting to change the rules of the game with a scary clinical efficiency – from warfare to espionage, from shop-floor dynamics to education, from healthcare to romance; replacing not just manufacturing labour; but even programmers with white coders. We observe two opposing trends and perspectives on AI by the Nobel laureates.
In this case, Schumpeter would be of immense value as he viewed the entrepreneurs in different eras, the bursts of exotic innovations coming in unexpected intervals, throwing up new products and leaving a trail of destruction in the closure of manufacturing units, supply chains, and once welcomed now obsolete goods resulting in withering away of fleeting profits of once successful monopolies. The roadmap of Mokyr explored is the historical genesis of creative destruction, while Aghion and Howitt strived to decipher its mechanism with a mathematical model.
The winners of 2025 Nobel prize in economics have reposed their faith in an orderly progress of technology where ideals sprout organically from commitments to research and development, as institutions back those researchers and researches with financial commitments. The oligopolistic corporations would convert those researches into products promote them with patents and go through efficacy and regulations. This is how big corporations being owned by capitalists invest their capital on R&D and then convert the research to products to profits.
6. Homo sapiens have the tendency to exploring unexplored terrains. It is in this context one of the greatest minds of 19th century political economist Johnn Stuart Mill who belongs to Utilitarianism critiqued socialism and classless society that Karl Marx proposed and spoke in favour of capitalism by advocating that it would preserve and promote liberties of individuals in their pursuit of wealth. His contributions continue to play in a world where clash of technology that swings in unpredictable ways. We live in a world of ambiguities and dilemmas, but we need to evolve clear ethical parameters and criteria.
Take any field or discipline be it from students to consultants to technocrats to scientists to industrialists have a say on AI, whether positively or negatively or in balanced ways. Those voices who say that ‘AI is the ultimate’, ‘replace God-head’, and thus pervaded into all segments of human life and activities and so there’s no way avoiding or escaping from it, but to live with it. In such a dilemma or paradoxical settings let me bring to the fore Schumpeter who said that: “I wanted to be the greatest economist in the world, the greatest horseman in Austria, and the best lover in Vienna. Well, I never became the greatest horseman in Austria.”
Beautifully elaborated that highlights two his fond dreams to become true. Close to a century late, economists today are grappling for answers to ever-changing questions, while technology threatens to redefine ‘love by altering the boundaries of attachments. The Austrian thinker did pitch the most important ethical principle/value Over and above, the top countries engaged in AI research are increasingly striving to control and to evolve a common ethical framework have now come to a realisation that AI is no more a science-fiction, but a reality. Innovations have always been a double-edged sword. We have more than 8-billion people in the world. Whether AI is eulogised as ‘the great the known unknown tells us what to do’. If this is the case, then who decides and how the decision-making process is done with.
To a question, whether AI businesses turn-out to be long lasting revolution or another dot-co style disaster; what’s significant right now is Sam Altman, an American entrepreneur, investor and the CEO of OpenAI, a research and deployment company, is one of the leading figures in the AI, known for developing and popularising AI technologies like ChatGPT responded by raising a question: Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time?” At the same time, Altmann described it as a bubble by elaborating “My opinion is also yes.” AI is obviously here to say and flourish, crush or no crush.” Nonetheless, AI is a bubble which has its limitations and thus susceptible to changing contours of science and technology, and so AI bubble is prone to bust – positing the nature and characteristic of impermanency of the ever-changing world.
7. For a question: does AI have emotions? The response is AI does not have emotions, and so does not respond to human emotions. Likewise, AI lacks the consciousness, self-awareness, and biological processes that enjoins genuine feelings. Furthermore, AI’s does not have the ability to truly “feel” empathy. Unlike humans, AI lacks subjective experience, emotions, and genuine concern for the well-being of others and help us to building common humanity. Let me conclude with Cheethan Kumar’s observation:
AI can rhyme, like bells can chime, write you a line and take no time, But be not fooled, it’s got no heart, and what’s a poet without that? No burden of past, no eyes to weep, its thoughts are just what wires keep. It feels no oy and feels no pain, sing in code – ghostly strain!
