For BRICS, the Digital Asset Question Isn't Which Currency Wins. It's Who Writes the Rules.

 

Every debate about digital assets eventually collapses into the same framing: will central bank digital currencies win, or will private stablecoins? I want to resist that question, because it points BRICS economies at the wrong problem. The interesting issue in front of us is not which form of digital money prevails. It is whether the different forms on offer, CBDCs, stablecoins, tokenised bank deposits, can be made to work with each other across borders. That problem is not primarily technical. It is legal and institutional, and as a bloc BRICS is not yet organised to solve it.

Start by clearing up the taxonomy, because it changes what the argument has to be about. A central bank digital currency is simply digital central-bank money. A stablecoin is a privately issued digital claim whose credibility rests on the quality of its reserves, its governance and the regulation around it. A tokenised deposit is a third thing again: ordinary commercial-bank money delivered through programmable infrastructure, which lets it become atomic, machine-readable, and usable in smart-contract settlement. These are not three competitors racing toward one winning technology. They are three layers of a monetary system that could, in principle, coexist. The real question is whether they can become interoperable forms of settlement rather than three separate, closed ecosystems each optimising for itself.

The same clarity is missing from how we talk about regulation. The instinct has been to regulate the technology, blockchain rails, tokens, wallets, when the more useful instinct is to regulate the economic function underneath it. If something performs a payment or settlement function, the questions that matter are old and familiar: who bears the risk if it fails, what backs the asset, can the holder redeem at par, who holds legal title to the reserves, how are client assets protected, how does AML and KYC actually work across the transaction. Technology moves globally and almost instantly. Financial regulation remains stubbornly jurisdictional. That mismatch, not block times or transaction throughput, is the structural problem cross-border digital assets actually face.

My years building India's Open Network for Digital Commerce taught me a lesson that generalises well beyond commerce: when you build an open network, the mistake is trying to build the biggest marketplace on it. The value sits in the protocol that lets many marketplaces, and many kinds of participant, interact on common terms. Applied to digital assets, the prize is not the best national CBDC or the most widely adopted stablecoin. It is the protocol layer that lets different forms of digital money and different tokenised assets interact across jurisdictions, without every pair of counterparties negotiating a bespoke arrangement from scratch.

Here is where most of the current conversation goes astray. Putting an asset on a blockchain is the easy part, and arguably the least consequential part. The hard part is building the legal, regulatory and settlement architecture around that asset so it holds up when the asset, the issuer, the investor, the custodian and the secondary market sit in five different jurisdictions. This is not hypothetical. Picture an asset originated in India, tokenised by an issuer based in Singapore, bought by an investor in the UAE, held by a custodian in Hong Kong, settled through a US-dollar stablecoin, and eventually traded in a secondary market somewhere else again. Every one of those legs raises a question that has nothing to do with cryptography: whose law governs ownership, transfer, custody, insolvency, taxation, investor protection and settlement finality. This is why I would argue legal interoperability matters more, in the end, than technical interoperability.

That argument rests on treating governance as infrastructure in its own right, not as a compliance afterthought bolted on to the technology. It is tempting to think of infrastructure as the visible layer, the APIs, the protocols, the databases, the blockchain itself. But the layer that actually determines outcomes is governance: who is allowed to participate, who sets the standards, who can change the protocol, how disputes get resolved, how neutrality is maintained, how incentives are structured. We have spent two decades getting reasonably good at making data interoperable. The next challenge, a considerably harder one, is making rights and value interoperable. A network that is technically open but institutionally captured, or institutionally absent, will not earn the trust that financial infrastructure requires. When the infrastructure in question carries property rights and financial value rather than product listings, governance stops being a nice-to-have and becomes the whole exercise.

None of this is an argument against tokenisation. It is an argument for sequencing it correctly. Tokenisation can genuinely improve accessibility, fractional ownership, distribution, transparency and settlement efficiency. Moving settlement from T+2 to T+0 can meaningfully reduce settlement risk. But multiply tokenisation platforms without a shared governance and legal layer underneath them, and the result is platform fragmentation and liquidity fragmentation instead of the promised efficiency gains. A tokenised illiquid asset is still an illiquid asset unless there is an ecosystem of buyers, sellers and interoperable venues around it. The danger ahead is not too little tokenisation. It is tokenisation proceeding faster than the interoperability layer that would let it function as an actual market rather than a collection of walled gardens.

The stakes rise further as the technology matures, because we are not simply digitising records anymore. The trajectory runs from digitising records, to tokenising individual assets, to tokenising entire transactions, to tokenising whole economic workflows: a tokenised security, a tokenised deposit, a digital identity credential, a compliance credential and a smart contract all interacting automatically to reach atomic settlement. At that point the system looks less like crypto and more like new financial market infrastructure. Every asset that can be tokenised can also be fractionalised, which is precisely why the governance question cannot be left until later. The more the workflow automates itself, the less room there is to fix a broken legal or governance layer after the fact.

This also reframes what serious capital actually prices. Investors weigh currency risk, counterparty risk, settlement risk, custody risk, liquidity risk, regulatory risk, jurisdictional risk and technology risk together, not settlement speed in isolation. Faster settlement does not automatically produce better markets if it arrives bundled with fragmented liquidity and unclear jurisdictional recourse. What institutional capital will actually reward is legal certainty, regulated custody, clear accounting and tax treatment, and enforceable interoperability, considerably more than it will reward a marginal improvement in settlement time. Nor does tokenisation replace traditional finance. Banks, exchanges, custodians, asset managers and market infrastructure providers all remain relevant; what changes is their role, as they move from being the entire transaction to being interoperable participants within it. The winner in this transition is unlikely to be the ecosystem that eliminates intermediaries. It is more likely to be the ecosystem that makes intermediaries interoperable.

This is where BRICS has a genuine opening that the current national CBDC conversations mostly miss. The instinct, understandably, is for each country to build its own system: its own CBDC, its own regulatory sandbox, its own custody rules. That instinct is not wrong on its own terms, monetary sovereignty is worth protecting, but it is insufficient on its own, because a collection of sovereign, non-interoperable systems produces exactly the fragmented outcome tokenisation was supposed to fix. The more ambitious version of BRICS digital-asset cooperation does not ask which member state builds the best CBDC. It asks whether BRICS economies can agree on shared standards for identity and KYC recognition, common frameworks for cross-border settlement finality, and workable governance for resolving disputes when something goes wrong across borders, all while every country keeps its monetary sovereignty fully intact. National CBDCs and tokenised deposits stay domestic. Regulated private stablecoins are free to coexist. Tokenised securities move across markets because the underlying legal and compliance architecture recognises them wherever they travel. No single country, and no single private platform, controls the network.

That is digital public infrastructure thinking applied to international finance rather than to domestic commerce, and it happens to play to a strength several BRICS economies already have relative to most Western financial centres. India, in particular, has already built and operationally proven open, interoperable digital infrastructure at national scale for identity, payments and commerce. That lived experience, more than any single country's crypto regulation, is the raw material for a BRICS approach to digital assets worth taking seriously.

The honest complication is that legal interoperability is far more politically difficult to negotiate than technical interoperability. Getting five or more sovereign regulators to agree on mutual recognition of custody, insolvency treatment and settlement finality is a slower, more contested process than agreeing on a messaging standard. But that is exactly why it is the more valuable thing to get right, and exactly why the work should start now, before each country's system hardens into an incompatible standard of its own. The window in which BRICS can shape this jointly, rather than reconcile five already-built systems after the fact, is not indefinite.

So the question worth putting to BRICS policymakers is not which country will have the best CBDC or the most credible stablecoin regime. It is whether the bloc is willing to do the harder, less visible work of building interoperable governance and legal recognition across its members, before technology forces a messier reconciliation later. We have become reasonably good, as an industry and as regulators, at making data move across borders. The next test, and the one that will actually determine whether tokenisation changes finance or simply relabels it, is whether we can make rights and value move across borders just as easily, without any one country or platform having to surrender control to get there.

In this context, the idea of the Finternet gives us a useful, consumer-centric framework for how this can evolve. The concept was proposed in a 2024 paper by BIS General Manager Agustín Carstens and Nandan Nilekani, following discussions at the G20 in Bengaluru, giving it a formal endorsement from the institution that sits at the centre of global central-bank cooperation. This has been since carried further through Networks for Humanity (NFH), a global nonprofit Nandan helped build that connects people, institutions and open networks around inclusive digital public infrastructure, with the Finternet as its core mission for the future of finance. The Finternet is not primarily about creating a new kind of money. It is about creating an open, internet-like infrastructure for the movement and exchange of value, where individuals and businesses, not financial intermediaries, sit at the centre, able to transfer any financial asset, in any amount, at any time, to anyone, anywhere. Carstens and Nilekani describe it as multiple financial ecosystems connecting with each other much as the internet connects networks, built on unified ledgers that make different forms of tokenised value interoperable by design rather than by bilateral negotiation. It is, in other words, the global equivalent of the DPI logic behind the argument above, aimed one layer further out, at the end user rather than the institution.

"It would be unfortunate if we ended up with a fragmented system and legal framework in which different digital currencies don't interoperate." - Agustín Carstens, General Manager, Bank for International Settlements, "Legitimacy, Privacy, Integrity, Choice: Towards a legal framework for central bank digital currencies," BIS Innovation Hub–FSI conference, Basel, 27 September 2023

 

Heaven, Hell, or Just a Nicer Rome?

What we're really building when the machines finally clock in

Picture a career counselor cornering a hunter-gatherer forty thousand years ago. "So," she says, clipboard in hand, "what's your passion?" The hunter-gatherer looks at her the way you'd look at your smartphone if it asked about your feelings. Passion wasn't on the menu. The menu was: find food before the food finds you, or before someone faster finds it first. For most of human history, "what do you want to be when you grow up" would have gotten you a short, literal answer. Alive. Ideally.

Once we settled into cities, towns, and villages, this didn't go away, it just got a filing system. You were a farmer, a carpenter, a stone cutter, a priest, or, if the dice rolled badly, someone else's property doing someone else's menial work. And that role wasn't a job in the modern sense, the kind you quit for a better offer. It was you. It got stitched into your family name, your neighborhood, your marriage prospects, and in a great many societies, into a caste system that made sure your grandchildren inherited the same slot whether they wanted it or not. Occupation wasn't what you did between nine and five. It was the answer to "who are you," full stop, and it stayed the answer for most of your waking life, for most of your life's length, across generations.

It's worth pausing on how brutal that filing system actually was, because we like to romanticize the pre-industrial "artisan economy" as a golden age of proud craftsmen. In truth, a huge share of the necessary work (mining, hauling, tanning, the unglamorous end of agriculture) was done by people with no say in the matter at all: slaves, bonded labor, the lowest rungs of whatever caste ladder a society had built. India built one of the more elaborate versions of this, a jati system precise enough to tell a family not just what they did but whom they could marry and which well they could drink from. The stone cutter who could at least pass his trade to his son was, relatively speaking, one of the lucky ones. Most of history's necessary, backbreaking work was done by people history didn't bother naming. That's the foundation this whole conversation about "purpose" sits on, and it's worth remembering before anyone gets too dreamy about the old days when everyone supposedly knew their place.

Then there was the other one percent: the people who never had to answer the food question at all. Aristocracies, priesthoods, the occasional lucky merchant dynasty. Freed from survival labor, they had something the stone cutter never got: time. Blank, unaccounted for, nobody-asking-you-to-justify-it time. Some of them turned it into the Parthenon, into Euclid's geometry, into the Medici funding Michelangelo, into the whole intellectual apparatus we now call civilization. Philosophy, art, and science are, in no small part, hobbies of people who didn't have to farm. Not a flattering origin story. But an honest one.

And some of that same leisure class turned their freedom into an extremely long, extremely well-funded party instead. Rome kept its idle patricians happy, and its restless plebs quiet, with the same trick: bread and circuses, until the circus more or less ate the empire. Every civilization that produced a class exempt from survival work also produced, right next door, a case study in what happens when that class runs out of ideas and settles for entertaining itself into oblivion. Leisure isn't automatically virtuous. It's a coin flip, and the house doesn't always win.

Now here's the strange part, the one that's easy to read past in your outline: that ratio barely moved for centuries. Steam engines showed up, then assembly lines, then computers, and menial jobs kept getting automated away in wave after wave. Every time, someone confidently announced that mass leisure was around the corner. John Maynard Keynes predicted, in 1930, that his grandchildren would be working fifteen-hour weeks by now, filling the rest of the week with what he called "the art of life": wine, philosophy, long walks, that sort of thing. Instead we got the smartphone, the reply-all chain, and a culture that treats being permanently reachable as a virtue. Technology kept freeing up time, and humanity kept finding new work to pour into it, the way water finds a container exactly its own size. The share of people working for survival, against the sliver pursuing art or science for its own sake, barely moved. We ended up with sharper tools. Not more Athenians.

Which is what makes this AI moment different, or at least worth taking seriously as different. Unlike the steam engine, artificial intelligence isn't proposing to automate one category of task at a time. It's proposing to push the cost of food, health, education, and a great deal of physical and cognitive labor toward something close to zero, all at once. If that happens even partially, the old math breaks for the first time in recorded history. Not a wave of automation moving people sideways into new jobs, but a real shrinking of the total survival work available to justify anyone's calendar. The stone cutter's job doesn't migrate to a new task. It simply stops being necessary. Multiply that across enough professions and the aristocratic condition, time without an economic excuse, stops being a rare inheritance and starts looking like everybody's problem.

Notice I called it a problem, not a gift. Two things tend to get quietly skipped when people wax lyrical about a coming age of AI leisure.

The first is who ends up owning the machines. Every leisure class in history got its free time by sitting on top of somebody else's labor or somebody else's land. If AI-driven abundance arrives and the compute, the models, and the resulting wealth pool mainly with a handful of platforms and their shareholders, we haven't actually dissolved the aristocracy-versus-everyone-else structure. We've just automated the peasants out of the frame and kept the aristocrats. A world where a small number of people own the intelligence running everything, and everyone else gets a subsistence stipend and an ocean of unstructured time, isn't obviously heaven. It might just be Rome with better broadband. Who captures the abundance matters at least as much as whether the abundance shows up.

The second thing that gets skipped is quieter and more personal: most people, handed the aristocrat's blank calendar without the aristocrat's centuries of cultural training in what to do with it, do not spontaneously turn into philosophers. We've actually run small trials of this. Lottery winners as a group do not reliably become patrons of the arts; plenty report the windfall made their lives worse, not better. Towns that lost their defining industry overnight, a mine, a mill, didn't pivot en masse into painting and civic theatre; many are still dealing with the wreckage decades later. Involuntary retirees describe a familiar arc: relief, then a slow, disorienting loss of the structure that used to give a day its shape. None of this is destiny. But it suggests that handing someone time is not the same act as handing them purpose, and confusing the two is how a society ends up with abundant leisure alongside record loneliness and doomscrolling as a full-time hobby. We didn't even need an emperor to fund our version of the circus. We built it ourselves, for free, in our own time, which might be the more embarrassing failure of the two.

There's an older, stranger precedent worth sitting with here, and it isn't the Roman one. Around the same few centuries, roughly the middle of the first millennium BCE, agricultural surplus freed up enough people across several unconnected civilizations, Greece, India, China, Persia, that historians sometimes call it the Axial Age: the era that produced the Buddha, Confucius, the Hebrew prophets, and Greek philosophy, all more or less at once, all as byproducts of societies that suddenly had people with time to think and no immediate famine to think about. Nobody fully agrees on why it happened in parallel across unconnected civilizations, only that it did. Surplus, in other words, has produced both Rome's circuses and civilization's deepest religious and philosophical traditions, sometimes from the very same societies. Which one you get seems to depend less on the surplus itself and more on whatever cultural scaffolding happens to be standing when the surplus arrives.

Which is really the only useful question left, and it isn't a technical one. If we're heading toward an Axial Age moment rather than another Roman one, a few things seem worth putting on the table, not as a program, more as a starting list for the argument. One is ownership: whether some of the gains from AI infrastructure get structured as a shared claim, closer to a sovereign fund with dividends than a purely private windfall, so that the freed-up time comes with the freed-up means to use it. Another is education, and specifically whether we keep training children almost exclusively for employability, or whether some real portion of that effort shifts toward cultivating craft, curiosity, and aesthetic judgment as ends in themselves, the way a guru-shishya tradition or an old-fashioned apprenticeship once did, deliberately, rather than as an accident of aristocratic upbringing. A third is cultural: whether we treat the coming surplus of time as a design problem worth arguing about in public, the way we currently argue about growth or inflation, instead of assuming it will sort itself out because the technology is exciting.

None of that is a policy paper, and it isn't meant to be one. It's closer to a starting list for a dinner-table argument that most people haven't started having yet, because the technology still gets discussed as a productivity story rather than the civilizational one it actually is. Every generation handed unearned time, the Athenian aristocrat, the Renaissance patron, the involuntary retiree, the lottery winner, has already run this experiment for us, in miniature, with famously mixed results. AI is about to run it again, at the scale of the entire species, all at once, with no dress rehearsal and no one else to blame if it goes wrong. Rome at least had an emperor to blame for the circuses. We will only have ourselves, and a scroll bar.

The machines, for the first time in history, are plausibly willing to foot the bill for the shift. What they cannot do is answer the question one economist saw coming a century early, and named more precisely than anyone has managed since.

"Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem: how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well."

— John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, 1930 

Empires of Intelligence: What the Colonial Past Can Teach Us About the AI Future

 

The tech superiority in shipping and gunpowder warfare, combined with the appetite for distant resources and captive markets, aided Spain and Portugal in colonizing the Americas from the 1490s. The British and Dutch East India Companies were chartered around 1600, extending this colonization.

Then came the Industrial Revolution in 18^th century: a handful of brilliant machines, the steam engine, the spinning jenny, the power loom, burst out of Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century, raced across Western Europe and the Atlantic, and remade human productivity forever.

What the Industrial Revolution did was not invent extraction — it industrialized it. Railways now hauled raw cotton out of colonized land and finished cloth back in, at a speed and scale no sailing ship could match. The telegraph let a handful of colonial offices in London coordinate an empire on which the sun never set. Steamships and the Maxim gun turned a slow, centuries-long process of colonization into the frantic, decades-long "Scramble for Africa." The machines did not create the logic of empire. They gave an existing logic ‘industrial teeth’.

That distinction matters, because it is also the more useful lens for thinking about artificial intelligence today. The worry is not that AI will cause a new colonization from nothing. It is that AI is industrializing a concentration of power that is already visible, already forming — and that, exactly as happened two centuries ago, the architecture being built right now will determine who spends the next century as a builder of intelligence and who spends it as a tenant.

The New Raw Material, the New Merchant Fleet

Colonial extraction needed three things: a resource worth taking, a fleet capable of moving it, and a captive market for what came back. Frontier artificial intelligence has its own version of all three. The resource is data - the accumulated digital exhaust of human behavior, conversation, and transaction. The fleet is compute: the small number of companies and countries that control advanced semiconductor fabrication, the data centers, and the energy to run them. And the captive market is everyone else, every individual, enterprise, and government that will consume intelligence as an API call rather than build it as sovereign infrastructure.

Look at where frontier foundation models actually get built today. A handful of firms in the United States and China account for nearly all of the models capable of general reasoning at scale. Building one requires not just world-class research talent but hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in compute, energy contracts that rival those of small nations, and access to a semiconductor supply chain concentrated in a handful of firms and geographies. Export controls on advanced chips are, in effect, the modern equivalent of a colonial power controlling who gets gunpowder. None of this is a moral accusation against the companies involved — they are responding rationally to the economics of the technology. But the structural resemblance to the old pattern of resource, fleet, and market is difficult to unsee once you look for it.

The Questions Policymakers Cannot Defer

This raises three questions that deserve to be asked plainly, even though the honest answers are uncomfortable.

How many countries, realistically, will ever have the capital, energy infrastructure, chip access, and research talent needed to build and maintain a frontier foundation model? The number today is small (probably fewer than half a dozen) and the barriers to entry are rising, not falling, as the frontier moves toward ever larger training runs.

What happens to the nations and enterprises that cannot cross that threshold? Do they simply rent intelligence indefinitely, the way a colonized economy once exported raw cotton and imported finished cloth at a price set elsewhere? Renting is not inherently ruinous; nations rent all kinds of capability today, from cloud infrastructure to vaccine manufacturing, without becoming colonies. But renting the layer that increasingly mediates commerce, education, healthcare, and governance is a different order of dependency, because it is not a discrete purchase; it is a permanent tax on every future transaction, and the terms of that tax are set entirely by the renter.

And is "intellectual colonization" too strong a phrase for this, or is it precisely the right one? Colonization was not merely economic dependency, it involved the erasure of local systems of knowledge and their replacement with the colonizer's categories, language, and worldview. A world in which every culture's laws, medicine, and commerce are mediated through a handful of models trained overwhelmingly on the historical and linguistic corpus of a few countries risks something structurally similar: not a flag planted in the ground, but a worldview quietly planted in the model weights that every other nation's citizens interact with daily.

These are not rhetorical questions asked for effect. They are the kind of question that, if left unanswered for another decade, answers itself by default,  in favor of whoever already holds the compute.

Two Ways to Diffuse the Power

If concentration is the risk, diffusion is the countermeasure, and there are two distinct architectural choices policymakers and technologists can push toward, both of which already have working precedents.

The first is pushing intelligence to the edge instead of pooling it at the center. Today's default architecture treats a handful of giant, universally trained models, updated continuously from everyone's interactions, as the intended destination for every query, every business process, every personal decision: an omniscient friend, philosopher, and guide for each individual and enterprise, with the full transcript of the relationship flowing back to a central server. An alternative already exists in embryonic form. Federated learning, a technique in which a model on a device learns from local data and sends back only aggregated, anonymized updates rather than the raw data itself  has been used for years in consumer products like predictive keyboards, precisely because it lets a system improve without every keystroke leaving the phone. Extend that logic further: a model that lives on a phone, a home router, or an enterprise gateway can handle the great majority of everyday reasoning locally, drawing on a general model only when it genuinely needs broader context, and sharing back to any central knowledge base only what the user or enterprise explicitly consents to share. The transaction stays local by default; participation in the global commons becomes an opt-in choice rather than an automatic surrender.

The second is resisting the pull toward one all-purpose model and instead building highly specialized models for individual domains like  health, education, law, financial services,  each trained deeply enough in its own field to outperform a generalist model at the tasks that actually matter to citizens in that domain, and each able to keep improving through use within that domain rather than through indiscriminate absorption into a universal corpus. The risk of leaving specialization there is that it simply recreates ten small walled gardens instead of one large one. The answer is open standards and protocols that let these specialized models interact with each other on a consent basis, a health model calling a financial-inclusion model to check affordability, an education model calling a language model to translate content into a local dialect,  without any of them needing to defer to, or route through, a single dominant global model to reason well.

This is not a hypothetical. India's own experience with open digital protocols is a working demonstration of the underlying principle, even though it was built for commerce rather than AI. Before the Open Network for Digital Commerce, digital commerce in India was consolidating toward the same pattern seen almost everywhere else: a small number of platforms that owned both the buyer relationship and the seller relationship, with every transaction and every unit of pricing power flowing through their walled infrastructure. ONDC instead created an open, interoperable protocol, built on the Beckn protocol, that let any compliant buyer app discover and transact with any compliant seller app, with no single platform sitting in the middle extracting rent from every exchange. The lesson generalizes directly to AI: an open protocol layer for model-to-model interaction could do for intelligence what an open commerce protocol did for retail - letting specialized, smaller players interoperate on equal footing instead of every interaction defaulting to whichever platform happens to be largest.

Both of these architectural choices carry a second, more practical benefit that should appeal to any finance ministry worried about the cost of the AI transition: they are cheaper. Routing the bulk of everyday reasoning through small, local, or narrowly specialized models rather than a giant universal model every single time reduces the number of tokens processed, the compute cycles consumed, and the electricity drawn from the grid. Diffusion is not only a safeguard against concentration of power; it is very plausibly the more economically sustainable path as AI usage scales into billions of daily interactions.

Why Digital Public Infrastructure Is the Precondition, Not an Afterthought

Neither of these architectural interventions works unless the underlying data exists in a usable, trustworthy, and interoperable form in the first place. A local model on a phone in a country where identity, land records, health records, and financial transactions are still paper-based, fragmented, or locked inside proprietary corporate databases has nothing meaningful to reason over. This is precisely the argument for treating digital public infrastructure — the interoperable, open "rails" for identity, payments, and data exchange that countries like India have built through systems such as Aadhaar and the Unified Payments Interface — not as a separate policy agenda from AI, but as its precondition.

The alternative to open, interoperable rails is not the absence of digitization; digitization is happening everywhere regardless. The alternative is digitization captured inside walled gardens controlled by a handful of private platforms, each sitting on a pool of data large enough to train a proprietary model, each with every incentive to prevent that data from ever becoming interoperable with a competitor's, and each able to charge rent on that data's use indefinitely. Digital public infrastructure, built on open standards with consent-based data sharing at its core, is what allows every country, not just the handful that can afford frontier compute,  to accumulate a well-structured, contextually rich pool of its own data, and to let smaller, local, or open-source models be trained meaningfully on that data instead of being permanently dependent on a foreign model's second-hand understanding of local context.

This is also, not incidentally, the strongest antidote to rent-seeking. A market with open, interoperable rails and many interoperating specialized models is a market with real competition, which pushes the cost of intelligence down for everyone. A market of walled gardens converging on two or three global models is a market that, however impressive the technology, will behave like a monopoly,  because eventually, it will be one.

The Choice Is Being Made Now

The colonizing nations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not sit down and vote on empire; the choice was made, cumulatively, by which ships got built, which trading companies got charters, and which technologies got industrialized first, long before most of the affected societies had any say in the matter. By the time the consequences were fully visible, the architecture was already locked in, and undoing it took centuries.

The architecture of artificial intelligence is being decided now, in this decade, in choices that look small: which protocols become standards, whether edge inference is subsidized or taxed, whether digital public infrastructure is built as an "open commons" or licensed out to whichever platform arrives first with capital. None of these choices individually looks like a decision about empire. Collectively, they are exactly that. The lesson of the last industrial revolution is not that the machines were the problem, it is that by the time everyone understood what the machines had made possible, the terms had already been set by whoever built them first.

Policymakers have a narrower window than they think to make sure that this time, the terms are set by more than a handful of hands.

 “Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate." -Columbia University professor Edward Said.

When AI Climbs the Quadrants of Success

 

What happens to careers, and to education, when machines start solving the problems we used to climb through

For decades, a professional career followed a script so familiar we rarely questioned it. Score well in school. Earn a professional degree that hands you a domain-its concepts, its standard procedures, its tricks, tips and tools. Land a job in an established institution or in government. Then climb, level by level, into steadily more complex problems, until either the ladder ends or you do.

Strip away the detail and every job at every level reduces to the same thing: solving problems, for yourself or for others. What changes as you rise is not the act but the kind of problem you are handed.

A map I drew fifteen years ago

In 2010 I sketched this progression as four quadrants of uncertainty, borrowing a frame from R. Gopalakrishnan and stretching it to fit a career. The two axes were simple: how well you can identify the problem, and how well you can find the solution. (The original post is here.)

In Quadrant 1, the problem is known and so is the solution. Success needs a good repository of knowledge and the discipline to apply it, you know the tune and you know the steps. In Quadrant 2, the solution is known but the problem is not; you earn your keep through analysis and root-cause deduction, figuring out what the crowd wants and then performing it. Quadrant 3 is where the known solutions run out: the problem is clear, but the answer must be invented, which demands curiosity, persistence, and the maturity to abandon an idea you have grown fond of. Quadrant 4 is the leader's terrain, problem undefined, solution unforged, only a vision of a place no one has been and the will to get others to build toward it.

Most careers walk this map slowly, from corner to corner. A few leap quadrants. A rare few begin in the hardest one. But the shape held for a generation, and organisations were built around it, entry rungs where the young learned their craft, senior rungs where judgment lived. The whole edifice assumed a pipeline: you paid your dues in Quadrant 1, and the paying itself was the education. The trainee who reconciled ledgers for three years was not just producing reconciliations; she was, without anyone naming it, absorbing the pattern-sense that would later let her spot the anomaly no procedure flagged. The value flowed in two directions, output for the firm, tacit judgment for the person, and we mostly noticed only the first.

It is worth being precise about what each quadrant rewards, because AI does not treat them equally. Quadrant 1 rewards fidelity: doing the known thing correctly and consistently. Quadrant 2 rewards diagnosis: seeing through symptoms to the actual fault. Quadrant 3 rewards invention under constraint: producing a solution that did not exist, to a problem you can at least name. Quadrant 4 rewards imagination under ambiguity: deciding what is even worth attempting when neither problem nor answer is given. Fidelity is the most codifiable of these, and codifiable is exactly what machines eat first.

Then AI walked onto the map

Every wave of technology made us better inside each quadrant. Better tools, better analysis, better reach. AI is different in kind, not degree: it does not just sharpen the work within a quadrant, it absorbs the quadrant.

Quadrant 1 is already substantially automatable. The junior coder writing from a known pattern, the first-line support agent following a script, the trainee doctor working through a differential, the junior lawyer drafting from a template; this is precisely the known-problem, known-solution work that current systems handle well. Quadrant 2, the diagnostic labour of finding the real problem before applying a known fix, is following fast; increasingly the machine does the root-cause pass and hands a human the shortlist.

Quadrants 3 and 4 will hold out longer. Genuine invention and genuine vision still sit beyond what these systems originate rather than remix. But "longer" is not "forever," and even here the honest word is augment: the innovator and the visionary will work with AI as a collaborator that widens what one mind can attempt.

Two stories, and the one that actually matters

You can tell this two ways. The grim version: AI is eroding the opportunities of a vast section of job-seekers, dissolving exactly the lower rungs where a generation once learned its trade. The expansive version: it multiplies what we can attempt, new problems become solvable, service quality rises, new forms of entertainment and enterprise appear, and human–AI collaboration opens frontiers we could not reach alone. Perhaps, eventually, even new geographies, new planets, a genuine abundance.

Both may turn out to be partly true, and we will argue about the balance for years. History gives ammunition to both camps: earlier automation destroyed categories of work while creating others we could not have named in advance, and the net was, over long horizons, more prosperity. But that reassurance carries an asterisk that is easy to skip past. The transitions were brutal for the people caught in them, they unfolded over generations rather than years, and the new work usually demanded capabilities the displaced did not have and could not quickly acquire. "It worked out eventually" is cold comfort to a cohort whose working life is the transition.

What is genuinely new this time is the direction of travel. Past machines climbed from the bottom, they took the physical, the repetitive, the manual, and human advantage retreated upward into cognition. AI climbs from a different face of the mountain. It is strongest precisely at the codified cognitive work we treated as the entry point to professional life. The rungs being removed are not only the lowest; they are the ones we used as the on-ramp to everything above.

But fixating on the optimist-versus-pessimist argument is a distraction, because it treats the outcome as weather, something that happens to us while we hold an umbrella. The decisive variable is not whether AI expands or erodes opportunity in the aggregate. It is whether we rebuild the one institution that decides which future the next generation is actually equipped for: education.

Here is the uncomfortable mechanism. For a century, education has been optimised to manufacture competent Quadrant-1 workers, people who can absorb a domain and execute known solutions reliably. The examination, the syllabus, the graded problem set, the very architecture of a degree, all reward the reliable reproduction of known answers. That was rational when the economy needed millions of such people and when Quadrant-1 competence was also the on-ramp to everything above it. AI breaks both halves of that logic at once. The economy needs far fewer Quadrant-1 executors, and the traditional path, learn the craft by grinding through its lowest tasks for a decade, no longer works when those tasks are the first to be automated. You cannot apprentice into judgment by doing the drudgery when the drudgery is gone.

This is the trap, stated plainly: the same system that is least useful for producing the capabilities AI cannot replicate is the system we are still running at full capacity. We are optimising harder for the quadrant that is vanishing, because that is the quadrant our institutions know how to measure, fund, and rank. The measurable is crowding out the valuable, and the gap widens with every model release.

What reinventing education would actually mean

If that diagnosis is right, tinkering will not save us. "Add a coding class, add an AI module" leaves the Quadrant-1 factory intact. The harder pointers, offered as arguments rather than certainties:

–    Stop teaching for recall; teach for judgment. When the machine holds the facts and executes the procedures, the human value is knowing which problem to solve, when the machine is wrong, and what to do when the situation falls outside the training data. Curriculum built around memorising and reproducing is training for the quadrant that is disappearing fastest.

–    Move Quadrant 3–4 skills forward by decades. We currently defer invention, ambiguity, and vision to the senior rungs, things you are "ready for" at forty. If AI collapses the lower rungs, an eighteen-year-old must start much closer to the top. That means teaching students to sit with ill-defined problems, run experiments, and tolerate the frustration of not knowing, early and deliberately, rather than as a reward for surviving the grind.

–    Rebuild the apprenticeship model without the drudgery. The old system had a hidden virtue: repetitive junior work quietly built pattern-recognition and tacit judgment. Remove the work and you remove the schooling. Someone has to design the replacement, simulated hard cases, AI as a sparring partner that poses problems rather than solves them, deliberate exposure to failure, so the young still develop instincts they can no longer absorb by osmosis.

–    Teach students to direct AI, not compete with it. The durable skill is orchestration: framing a problem well, interrogating an AI's output, catching its confident errors, and combining several tools toward an end. This is closer to managing a talented, unreliable team than to using a calculator, and almost no curriculum teaches it.

–    Make learning genuinely continuous, and mean it. "Lifelong learning" has been a slogan for thirty years while the actual structure, front-load education, then work, stayed fixed. If the ground shifts every few years, the institutional model of a one-time degree followed by a career is itself obsolete. Re-entry into education has to become normal, cheap, and expected, not a mid-life exception.

–    Credential the things machines can't yet certify. As AI can pass most knowledge tests, the signalling value of exams that measure recall collapses. What still needs a human verdict, originality, judgment under ambiguity, the quality of a question rather than an answer, is exactly what our assessment systems are worst at measuring. That gap is where the reinvention has to happen.

None of these is a finished blueprint, and reasonable people will contest several. The point is the direction: an education system that keeps producing Quadrant-1 graduates for Quadrant-1 jobs that no longer exist is not protecting the young, it is walking them off a cliff with a certificate in hand.

The real question

So the future of work is not, at heart, a question about AI. AI is the forcing function. The real question is whether our schools, universities and training systems can stop preparing people to begin at the bottom of a ladder whose bottom rungs have been sawn off, and start teaching the next generation to begin where the machines, for now, still cannot follow.

We will figure out the world of abundanc
e or scarcity as it comes. What we decide now is whether the coming generation is built to shape that world or to be displaced by it. That decision is being made, mostly by inertia, in classrooms today.

 

“Disruption becomes transformative when it does not merely change what we do, but changes the ground on which we decide what is possible.”

THE UPSIDE WITHIN

 

The morning we launched NSDL, the newspaper called it “a new era for Indian investors.”

I kept that line in my head in the coming days as the purpose of our existence. Because for almost a year, that was all we had. The headline said new era. The ledger said single digits.

Not thousands of accounts. Not hundreds. Single digits, against a country of investors we were supposed to be opening this for.

And every few weeks the phone would ring, from the press, from the markets. “How many today?” And I would give a number you could count on one hand.

Then the same newspapers that had written “new era” printed the verdict. “A costly experiment that isn’t working.” Change the model. It has failed.

I was not the man in charge, I was young, and a part of the founding team. But when you read your project’s obituary in the same paper that announced its birth, seniority doesn’t protect you. It felt like mine.

And I had the choice a lot of you either have had or are going to have. Walk away from something the world has already buried or don’t.

Now you’re waiting for the grit speech. I pushed harder, I never gave up, believe in yourself.

That would be a lie. It wasn’t grit. Grit often is just fear with its teeth clenched, and fear cannot build anything new, a mind in panic can only defend, it cannot imagine.

What got us through was quieter. Two things that our MD and mentor Mr Bhave instilled in us. A sense of gratitude to steady the mind, a grip on what was still standing, even at single digits. And a purpose to point it, a reason worth the year.

Steady, and aimed. That combination will attempt almost anything. We just didn’t have the words for it yet. We only had the account that wouldn’t open, and a reason I couldn’t let go of.

Here’s the thing nobody warns you about hard problems. There’s a kind where you know the problem and you know the answer, you just do the work. There’s a harder kind where you know the problem but not the answer. And then there’s the last kind, where you don’t know the problem and you don’t know the answer. You set out with nothing but the shape of a dream in the dark.

That’s where the depository lived. That’s where anything worth building lives. Not with a plan, with a shape, and the nerve to walk toward it.

There’s an old story. A mouse complains to a lion his life is too dangerous. “Simple,” says the lion. “Become as big as me.” “But how?” asks the mouse. “That’s your problem,” says the lion. “I’m the king. I only make policy.”

Most grand visions are that lion. A magnificent goal, and none of the weight of how. A real purpose is the opposite; it’s a dream you agree to carry the how for. That’s the whole difference between a leader and a slogan.

Picture a metro station that’s been spotless for years. Not one wrapper. Not one mark on the wall. And notice what that does to you, you’d feel ashamed to be the one who drops the first thing.

Now picture one cigarette butt in the corner. Just one. And something in you shifts. Now one more won’t matter. And if there are already ten thousand complaints no one has answered, what harm can one more do?

That’s how a station falls apart. That’s how an institution falls apart. And that’s how a person falls apart. Never in one collapse, always one small permission at a time.

So the hardest discipline of that whole year wasn’t heroic. It was an account that everyone said wasn’t worth chasing. And chasing it anyway. Because the day you stop caring about the one, you’ve already started to fall.

Years later I was asked to build something much larger. An open network, so the smallest shopkeeper in the country could reach a buyer anywhere, without belonging to anyone’s walled garden.

And early on, it came back. The doubt. The “this will never work.” The pressure to quietly change the model. The same cold feeling I’d had years before, alone, at single digits.

But this time I recognised it. I knew exactly what state I was in, and I knew it was lying to me. The steadiness I’d stumbled into by accident the first time, I could now find on purpose.

Same two things. Bigger stage. I won’t walk you through what got built. What matters today is only this, it was portable. Whatever carried a frightened young man through one project carried a national idea through the next. It travelled with me.

And then it did something I didn’t expect. It left.

The idea travelled to another country. There’s an Indonesia Open Network now, and I’m part of it, but not as the founder, and not as the man in charge. As a mentor. My entire job is to help a local team learn from our idea, and our mistakes, and then to make sure they own it, and they deliver it.

Think about what that proves. If this had really been mine, my brilliance, my achievement, it couldn’t move. It would still need me. The fact that it’s growing in Jakarta, in hands that aren’t mine, in a language I don’t speak, that’s the proof it was never mine to begin with.

The idea was never in me. It was in the idea. And the idea only proved its upside the moment it stopped needing me.

So, that headline. “A new era for Indian investors.” It turned out it was never really about investors, or accounts, or a model that worked.

It was a test of what was inside, whether there was something under the failure steady enough, and aimed enough, to chase one stuck account through almost a year of obituaries.

Every one of you is carrying something right now that looks, from the outside, like the odds are against it. And you’ve been told the upside is out there, in a better year, more money, an easier hand.

It isn’t out there. It never was.

And you’ll know it was real not when it makes you look big, but when it outgrows you. When you can put it in someone else’s hands, step back, and watch it stand without you.

That’s the upside within. It was never meant to stay inside you.

Insurance for a Billion: Will AI Make It Fairer, or Just More Precise?

 

[This article is built around thought I shared in the round table titled “Insuretech for India” at Stride Forward 26]

India built the world's most complete public digital infrastructure to include people. The next test is whether it uses AI to protect more of them,  or to price the riskiest ones out.

Insurance is the one financial product designed to work by pooling strangers together. The healthy subsidise the sick, the lucky subsidise the unlucky, and everyone buys protection against a future none of them can predict. That is not a flaw in the model. It is the model. Artificial intelligence is now very good at predicting exactly who will get sick, who will crash, and whose house will flood, and that ability, left to run on its own logic, quietly dismantles the thing that made insurance worth having.

This is the real question hanging over the insurance industry, and it is sharpest in India, not because India is behind, but because India is unusually well equipped to take it either way. Over the last decade the country has assembled the most complete public digital infrastructure in the world: a billion-scale digital identity, real-time payments, consent-based data sharing, digital documents and signatures. That stack was built, deliberately, to include people who markets had left out. The same stack, pointed at insurance and combined with AI, can be used to include far more people,  or to segment them so finely that the ones who most need cover can no longer afford it. India will have to choose. Most countries will not get to make that choice as consciously, because they lack the rails to make either outcome happen at scale.

So it is worth being clear about what is actually at stake, and where the genuinely hard problem lies — because it is not where most of the industry conversation puts it.

The easy part: insurance is about to disappear into everything else

Start with the parts that are, by now, close to consensus. The first wave of insurance technology everywhere,  cheaper distribution, faster underwriting, quicker claims, lower operating cost,  is largely a solved direction of travel. Three shifts follow from it, and they will define the next several years.

Insurance becomes embedded rather than sold. It stops being an annual contract you remember to renew and becomes a service that attaches itself, invisibly, to something else you are already doing. You buy a two-wheeler and accident cover comes with it. You take a home loan and property cover is part of the transaction. You book a trip, finance an MSME invoice, buy farm equipment, or see a doctor on a health platform, and the relevant protection is simply present. India's digital platforms make this possible at a scale few markets can match. The right ambition is for insurance to become, in the phrase I keep coming back to, always present but almost invisible.

AI settles the straightforward claims in near real time. A large share of claims are simple, honest, and slow only because a human has to look at them. Those will be assessed and paid in minutes. This matters less as an efficiency story than as a trust story, which I will come to.

Every citizen carries a portable insurance profile. Identity, verified financial history, health records shared with consent, property records, and past claims can travel with the individual rather than being locked inside one insurer. That lets a person move between insurers without starting from zero each time, and it lets underwriting happen in real time at a fraction of today's cost.

None of this is the hard part. It is expensive and fiddly to build, but the direction is not in doubt and the benefits are real. If this were the whole story, the correct posture would be enthusiasm and patience.

The barrier that technology alone does not fix

The deeper obstacle in India has never been mainly technological. It is trust, and it has four distinct faces. People do not reliably know what to buy, whether a claim will actually be honoured when it matters, whether the premium they are quoted is fair, or whether the whole process is simple enough to be worth attempting. Every one of those is a reason someone who should be insured is not.

Technology helps with each, AI-assisted advice for the first, transparent pricing for the third, paperless onboarding and cashless claims for the fourth. But the second, whether claims are honoured, is where technology and trust actually meet. A claims process that pays honest claims in minutes, visibly and repeatedly, builds the kind of trust that a marketing campaign cannot. That is why real-time claims settlement matters more than its efficiency suggests: it is the mechanism by which an industry with a credibility problem earns credibility back.

Why India can build rails, not just products

Here is where India's position differs from most markets, and it is worth stating precisely rather than triumphantly. Elsewhere, the natural unit of progress is the company: a better insurer, a smarter underwriting model, a slicker app, each building its own private ecosystem. India has the option to build the shared layer underneath all of them,  common digital rails for insurance in the way real-time payments became common rails for money, so that insurers compete on top of shared infrastructure instead of each rebuilding the plumbing.

The reason India can attempt this is that most of the foundation already exists and is public: verifiable identity, a consent architecture for sharing financial and health data, digital documents and signatures. Very few countries have that combination in public hands. The missing layer is insurance itself , the standards and rails that would let a verified individual be underwritten, insured, and served across providers with their consent and without friction. Get that layer right and the cost of issuing and servicing a policy falls far enough that protecting a low-income family becomes commercially viable rather than charitable. This is the genuinely globally significant experiment, and it is why people outside India should be watching it: it is a test of whether insurance can be run as public infrastructure rather than only as a private product.

But this is exactly where the capability turns double-edged, because the same rails that can underwrite a poor family in real time can also price that family out in real time. The infrastructure is neutral. The choice is not.

The tension at the centre: pooling versus prediction

Traditional insurance rests on risk pooling. AI, fed with rich personal data, pushes relentlessly toward risk segmentation,  pricing each individual according to their own predicted risk. Taken to their logical ends, these two ideas are in direct conflict. The better AI becomes at predicting risk, the worse insurance becomes at sharing it.

Follow the logic to its conclusion. Healthy, low-risk people pay very little, as they should on pure actuarial grounds. High-risk people face premiums that climb until cover is effectively out of reach. The result is quietly perverse: the people who most need protection are the ones priced out of it. That does not just produce an unfair market. It hollows out the social purpose of insurance altogether, because a pool that has expelled everyone likely to claim is no longer performing the one function that justified it.

This is not a hypothetical that regulators have failed to notice. It is precisely why many jurisdictions already prohibit insurers from using certain information, genetic test results, disability status, pregnancy, some pre-existing conditions, various protected characteristics. Those prohibitions are not technological limits; the data is often perfectly usable. They are deliberate policy choices to preserve solidarity even when better prediction is available. AI does not create this dilemma. It sharpens it to a point, by making near-perfect prediction cheap and universal rather than partial and expensive.

The better question: predict risk, or prevent it?

There is a way out of the trap, and it comes from asking a different question. What if AI were used not to charge sick people more, but to make them less likely to be sick?

Imagine an insurer that continuously observes, with consent, the early signals,  rising blood sugar, worsening blood pressure, an irregular heart rhythm. The segmentation instinct is to reprice the moment the risk appears. The alternative is to intervene: a teleconsultation, nutrition coaching, subsidised medication, a fitness programme, an early screening. If the intervention works, the person stays healthier, hospitalisations fall, claims drop, the insurer's costs fall with them, and society carries a lighter burden of disease. The insurer stops being a payer of claims and becomes a manager of health outcomes. Prediction is put to work preventing the loss rather than pricing it.

That reframes the whole debate. The question regulators and builders should be asking now, at the start of AI adoption and not after the practices have set, is a simple one with large consequences: should AI be used primarily to predict risk more accurately, or to reduce risk before it materialises? An industry that mostly predicts becomes more exclusionary with every improvement in its models. An industry that mostly prevents becomes more inclusive as its models improve. Same technology; opposite social result. The difference is a design choice, and design choices are easiest to make early.

A question for society, not for the algorithm

Insurance has always balanced two principles that pull against each other: actuarial fairness, which says each person should pay according to their own risk, and social solidarity, which says a pool should absorb risk on behalf of those who draw the unlucky number. For most of the industry's history the balance was set by ignorance,  insurers simply could not price individuals finely enough to fully abandon the pool. AI removes that ignorance. It will make actuarial fairness very nearly perfect.

Which means the balance can no longer be left to accident. The real question is no longer what insurers are able to price, but how much solidarity a society chooses to keep once perfect pricing is possible. That is not a question an algorithm can answer. It is a question for society, and it has to be answered on purpose.

India is unusually well placed to lead that conversation, and not by coincidence. Its digital public infrastructure gives it prediction capabilities that few countries can match, and its public policy has, through that same infrastructure, consistently chosen to expand inclusion rather than optimise markets for their own sake. That combination is rare: the technical capacity to segment perfectly, paired with a stated preference for including everyone. The test for Indian insurance technology — and the reason the rest of the world has a stake in how it goes — is whether it uses AI to expand protection or merely to refine pricing.

India's last financial inclusion story was about opening bank accounts, and it largely succeeded. The next one will not be about accounts at all. It will be about how many lives we choose to protect once we finally have the tools to protect, or to exclude, every one of them.

The better a machine gets at predicting who will suffer, the more deliberately a society must decide to stand with them anyway.

The Queen or the Swarm: Why AI’s Future Depends on Who Gets to Learn

The detailed version of my oped in Transcontinental Times 

Every species that has ever competed for resources on this planet has done so with roughly the same toolkit: strength, speed, camouflage, venom, numbers. Humans are unremarkable on most of these axes. We are slower than a cheetah, weaker than a chimpanzee, blinder in the dark than an owl, and worse at smelling danger than almost anything with a snout. What we do better than any other species, by an order of magnitude no other animal comes close to, is cooperate with strangers at scale.

A wolf pack cooperates. So does a beehive. But a wolf will not lay down its life for a wolf it has never met from a pack three mountains away, coordinated by a shared story none of them witnessed. Humans do this routinely. We show up at war memorials for people we never knew, buy shares in companies run by executives we’ve never met, and hand savings to banks based on nothing but a shared belief that the institution will honor its promises. Yuval Harari’s core insight in Sapiens, that humans are unique in our capacity to organize around shared fictions: nations, currencies, corporations, human rights, describes exactly this. None of these things exist as physical objects. They exist because enough people agree to act as if they do, and that agreement is what lets seven strangers organize a supply chain across four continents.

That capacity has a name in organizational theory: institutionalized trust. And it has a delivery mechanism: communication, first spoken, then written, then encoded into the procedures, contracts, and bureaucracies that let a stranger in Rotterdam trust a signature from a stranger in Chennai. Bureaucracy earns a bad reputation as red tape, but at its root it is a trust technology, a set of standardized procedures that lets unrelated people transact without needing to personally verify each other’s character. Double-entry bookkeeping, the joint-stock company, the postal system, the passport, these are all inventions in the same category as language itself: tools that let cooperation scale past the roughly 150 people (Robin Dunbar’s famous number) that our brains can track through personal relationship alone.

Physical technology has always ridden alongside this social technology, amplifying it. The wheel didn’t just move goods faster, combined with standardized axle widths and road networks, it made regional trust networks viable at distances no courier on foot could sustain. The printing press didn’t just reproduce text,  by making the Bible, and later pamphlets, newspapers, and scientific journals, available to anyone literate, it broke the monopoly that scribal elites held over what counted as agreed-upon truth, and in doing so it re-founded whole religious and political orders. The telegraph, the telephone, the internet: each one is, underneath the marketing, a new trust-and-coordination layer stacked on the ones before it.

Now comes artificial intelligence, and it is not just another rung on that ladder. It is different in kind, because for the first time the tool doesn’t merely transmit human-generated trust signals faster ,  it can generate judgment, synthesis, and decisions on its own. That changes the question. It’s no longer just “how fast can strangers coordinate” but “who gets to do the coordinating, and on whose behalf.”

There are two directions this can go, and they lead to very different civilizations.

The first direction: the Borg model

A small number of frontier labs - right now, realistically, a handful of companies in two countries - train models on a scale of data and compute that nobody else can replicate: the entire searchable internet, increasingly private data through partnerships and acquisitions, and enough proprietary usage logs from hundreds of millions of daily conversations to know how people think, argue, and decide better than the people know themselves. Everyone else becomes a client, querying a central intelligence that has never revealed what it learned about them to anyone but itself. It is not an accident that the Star Trek Borg is the right metaphor: a distributed set of drones, individually unremarkable, whose intelligence is aggregated upward into a Queen who alone sees the whole picture and alone decides. Assimilation doesn’t require malice. It only requires that everyone’s data flows one way  upwards ,  while judgment flows back down as a service.

The second direction: diffusion

Instead of one model trained on everyone’s data and queried by everyone, imagine a nested architecture of intelligence that mirrors the way trust itself has always scaled in human societies - from individual to family to community to nation, each layer adding coordination without fully surrendering what came before it. A personal model that learns primarily from an individual’s own history and stays substantially theirs. A household-level router that reconciles the family’s shared needs,  finances, schedules, health, without exporting the raw data to any central party. Community and institutional layers that pool just enough signal to coordinate like a hospital network sharing anonymized treatment outcomes, a farming cooperative sharing yield data and so on without surrendering the underlying record. National or civilizational layers that federate further still, for the genuinely public-goods problems: pandemic response, climate modeling, financial stability. Intelligence increases with altitude, but so does the friction required to extract raw data upward. This is closer to how evolution actually organizes complexity -  through modular, semi-autonomous units that coordinate without fully centralizing control - than the single-brain model the Borg represents.

The diffusion model is the one worth betting on, but it is worth being honest about why it isn’t automatic. Model weights being “open” or a chatbot running locally on a phone does not, by itself, redistribute power. Underneath even the most local-feeling AI product today sits a stack that is still extremely concentrated: pretraining compute that only a few labs can afford, chip design and fabrication controlled by a handful of firms in a handful of countries, and energy infrastructure that is itself a scarce, geopolitically contested resource. An open-weight model trained on a closed, centrally-scraped corpus is diffusion in name and centralization in substance , a longer, more comfortable road to the same Queen. If this century’s version of the printing press turns out to require a printing press factory that only three governments can build, the diffusion story collapses into the Borg story with better marketing.

There is, however, an answer to the training problem, and it comes from the closest analogy available: how humans themselves acquire capability. Every human being is “pretrained” on a broad common corpus - language, schooling, the accumulated knowledge of a culture - before developing anything distinctive. Universal education does not centralize human intelligence; it equips each mind to then learn recursively from its own experience, in directions no curriculum planned. The base model can play the same role: a common endowment, trained once on broad public data, the way a public education system is funded once for everyone. Diffusion becomes real at the point past that endowment , when each node in the hierarchy, whether an individual, a household, a firm, or a community, holds not merely a copy of the model but the capacity to keep learning from what it alone can see, and when the owner of that node decides what portion of the learning is exposed upward. This mirrors how capability has always worked in human society. A doctor shares her diagnosis, not the decade of pattern recognition behind it; a firm sells its product, not its process knowledge; a family teaches its children things it would never publish. Skill and disclosure have always been separable, and that separability is precisely what a query-everything-through-the-center architecture destroys - the center learns from every interaction, while the individual accumulates nothing that is durably theirs.

Honesty requires admitting that this recursive-learning-at-the-edge capability does not fully exist yet. Most of what is marketed today as personalization is retrieval: the model consults an individual’s documents and history at query time without changing itself, which means the accumulated learning still lives wherever the model lives. Genuine local learning,  models that update themselves from experience, cheaply, on modest hardware, without catastrophically forgetting what they already knew remains a hard, open engineering problem. The technical trajectory, to be fair, is bending in the right direction: models keep getting smaller for a given level of capability, techniques for cheap adaptation keep improving, and consumer chips now ship with dedicated neural hardware as a matter of course. What is not bending is the commercial trajectory. The economics of every frontier lab reward keeping the learning loop at the center, because centrally accumulated learning is the moat, the more the central model learns from everyone, the harder it becomes for anyone to leave. So the two trajectories diverge: feasibility is diffusing outward while deployment keeps concentrating inward, and it is precisely in that gap that policy has work to do. Recursive learning at the edge will not be handed down by incumbents whose business model it undermines; waiting for the market to deliver it is like waiting for the scribes to distribute the printing press. It has to be pulled forward deliberately  by public research funding, by procurement rules that require publicly purchased AI systems to support local learning and owner-controlled disclosure, and by writing the principle that the learning stays with the learner into data protection law, the way purpose limitation was written in a generation ago.

So the honest version of the bet is not “small models will save us.” It is that diffusion has to be built deliberately, at every layer of the stack, the way earlier trust infrastructure was built deliberately, through standards, law, and public investment, not left to emerge on its own from a market that has every incentive to concentrate.

There is precedent for exactly this kind of deliberate construction, and it is worth pointing to because it already exists rather than remaining hypothetical. India’s approach to digital public infrastructure - a unified payments protocol that any bank or fintech can plug into rather than routing transactions through a single dominant platform, a verifiable-credentials system that lets individuals hold and share their own documents rather than surrendering them to a central database, and an open commerce network that lets buyers and sellers transact across competing apps rather than being locked into whichever platform got there first,  is essentially an attempt to build trust infrastructure as a shared, low-lock-in utility rather than as proprietary rails owned by one company. It is not a perfect model and it has real gaps, but it demonstrates something important: that population-scale coordination doesn’t require a single controlling entity if the protocol layer is deliberately kept open and interoperable. The lesson for AI is not “copy this system” so much as “copy the design principle”, build the equivalent of open rails for identity, data portability, and model access, so that intelligence can be composed from below rather than only distributed from above.

What would that take in practice? A few concrete interventions, none of them exotic:

•         Data portability as an enforceable right, not a feature,  so an individual’s interaction history can move with them between AI providers the way a phone number now moves between carriers, preventing lock-in from doing quietly what outright control could not do openly.

•         Public or multilateral investment in compute and energy capacity outside the two or three countries that currently dominate it, on the model of how public investment built highways and rural electrification rather than waiting for private markets to reach unprofitable places on their own schedule.

•         Interoperability standards for model-to-model and agent-to-agent communication, so a household-level or community-level system can coordinate with a national one without needing to be owned by the same company that owns the national one,  the AI equivalent of the postal system agreeing on envelope sizes.

•         Regulatory pressure specifically aimed at the infrastructure layer,  chips, cloud capacity, energy contracts , rather than only at the visible chatbot layer, since that is where real concentration risk is currently accumulating fastest and most invisibly.

•         A cultural shift among the capable middle tier of nations, those with talent, institutions, and ambition but not frontier-lab-scale capital, toward building shared, federated capability with each other rather than each negotiating bilaterally and separately with the handful of dominant labs, which only reproduces a hub-and-spoke Borg structure one client relationship at a time.

Sceptics of the diffusion path will point out, correctly, that some problems genuinely need a Queen, or at least a very large brain. Pandemic modelling, climate prediction, and fundamental scientific discovery benefit from the kind of massive, centralized compute that only a handful of institutions can field, and no household-level router is going to fold a protein or model a hurricane. The diffusion argument is not that centralized capability should not exist. It is that centralized capability should be treated the way we treat other infrastructure with natural concentration risk, nuclear power, undersea cables, the electrical grid,  as a public utility subject to oversight, access rules, and accountability, rather than as the private property of whichever company got there first. The European Union’s AI Act, whatever its flaws in execution, is at least an attempt to draw that line: to say that as models approach systemic scale, the obligations on their operators should scale with them. Export controls on advanced chips are a cruder version of the same instinct, aimed at slowing the concentration of the compute layer rather than the software layer, even if their current form is more about geopolitical rivalry than about distributing power more broadly.

And the early scaffolding for genuine diffusion is already visible. Federated learning in healthcare, hospitals training shared diagnostic models by exchanging model updates rather than patient records,  demonstrates that collective intelligence does not require pooling raw data in one place. On-device inference, now standard on flagship phones, means a growing share of everyday AI use never has to leave the device at all. Neither fully solves the concentration problems described above, but both show that the direction is technically viable; what is missing is the institutional will to deploy such architectures at population scale rather than leaving them as premium features for those who can already afford to ask.

Humanity’s edge was never raw intelligence. It was the invention of trust technologies that let intelligence combine across strangers without requiring a single mind to hold it all. Writing, law, currency, and bureaucracy did this by distributing judgment while standardizing the interface between people. Whether AI becomes a fifth trust technology in that lineage, or the tool that finally lets a single mind hold it all, is not a question that resolves itself as models get better. It resolves according to who builds the rails underneath them, and how deliberately the rest of us insist that those rails stay open. That is a choice still being made, right now, mostly in rooms far from public view — which is exactly why it needs to be argued for in public.

 

"We taught the whole species to read. We did not hand every book to one reader."