Reframing "AI for Development"
Dominant narratives claim that “the future” means digitizing everything—but in practice, digital systems often serve state interests: controlling populations, boosting corporate growth, and performing innovation on a global stage while evading accountability. Alix talks with Usha Ramanathan to reframe “DPI and AI” and explore how to ensure digitization doesn’t simply become privatization.
USHA RAMANATHAN – AI FOR DEVELOPMENT
Usha Ramanathan is an Indian lawyer, activist, and researcher who has worked on law, poverty, and rights for the past fifteen years. She has been a leading figure in India’s privacy movement and has tirelessly highlighted problems with the Aadhaar digital ID project.
In this conversation, Ramanathan unpacks the “AI for development” narrative from the longer perspective of India’s digital development journey, focusing on the Aadhaar project and its meddling with the welfare state. She tracks the continuities between these projects, showing how they have been propelled by false promises and threats of exclusion. While they have benefited the state and corporate sector, they have delivered suffering and precarity to most Indians. In place of the utopian perfection promised by promoters of AI and digital technologies, Ramanathan calls for a humanism based on struggles for freedom and self-realization.
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