AI Summit 2026

Reframing "AI for Development"

with
Usha Ramanathan

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 “AI for Development” and explore how to ensure digitization doesn’t simply become privatization.

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Frame
We’re told the future means everything that can be digitised should be digitised. Nations are framed as needing companies to drive innovation and modernise interactions with the state, with the promise that new markets will open and benefit everyone.
Flip
Reframe
In reality, many digital systems imposed on the public serve state interests: expanding control, enforcing efficiency, and evading accountability. These investments prioritize corporate growth, population surveillance, and the performance of competence and innovation on a global stage.
The path forward
Digital technologies could help states deliver quality services and regulate fast-growing companies responsibly. But development efforts must center people’s needs, prevent digitization from becoming privatization, and build systems that learn from mistakes and make reparations when harm occurs.

USHA RAMANATHAN – AI FOR DEVELOPMENT

Written companion piece by AI Now Institute

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.

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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.

Read the full essay

Explore the series

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Linguistic Diversity

Chenai Chair

Open Source

Meredith Whittaker

Accountability

Nikhil Dey

"I'm not sure at all that this is any great technical project. This is really a project of shepherding people, controlling people, bullying… It’s a project that, throughout, has been propelled by threats and the threat of exclusion."

Usha Ramanathan
Lawyer, activist, and researcher

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