Sanjeev Ahluwalia | Synchronise The AI Pace, Robotics, Population Fall

There is little reason to expect a more coordinated response to climate action in future, than the lacklustre outcome at the Belem global summit in Brazil in November. Global contestation and transactional arrangements are on the increase. This augurs poorly for protecting the global commons. Nor is there a groundswell of a “greater” moral force to glue coordinated actions for the good of humanity.

For half a century after the Second World War, ideology did fashion coordinated political action — the liberal, free market Western theology versus centralised, Communist discipline. In 1990, once the Soviet Union collapsed, Francis Fukuyama prematurely claimed victory for liberalism. What we got instead is the absence of ideology or principled State action, beyond a focus on transactional gains.

China, despite its “Chinese characteristics” is more efficiently capitalist than the US. The US is as authoritarian as Russia with centralisation of powers in the two Presidents. The UK is more timidly socialist that India. There is no recognisable grand political framework, to induce agreement on much needed, deep, social and economic adjustments and change — such as who must bear the cost of a “just transition”. And there are mammoth changes on the way — climate action to keep the earth safe is one. Harnessing the benefits of Artificial Intelligence without unleashing its disruptive outcomes on human dignity, communities and cultures is another. Countries are adrift, working out practical paths, from first principles, to face uncertain futures.

Even if by some miracle, we manage to navigate the ravages of climate change, the relentless growth of AI, robotics and space-based military capacity will reduce “agency” with today’s human power centres — villages, cities, provinces and countries. Existing country borders might become historical landmarks not markers for trade, investment or military control. Territorial conquests might become unnecessary as neural conquests capture the minds and imagination of entire countries at scale, subverting domestic leadership and management structures.

The trilogy of AI, robotics and neural science advances will have three consequences. First, unimaginable advances in efficiency as already visible in compute capabilities. Global installed data centre capacity is 114 GW in 2025, up from 21.4 GW in 2005 – a five-time increase in 20 years. Meanwhile, transistor density has increased by one hundred times from 90 nanometres in 2000 to 2 nanometres in 2025, packing in more power, reduced electricity use and materials consumption and lower heat loss.

Second, there are already about 8 million industrial and service robots in use today, with China the fastest adaptor at about 2 million robots. That is still miniscule relative to the global human workforce of about 3.5 billion. But robots are expected to boom at high single digits per year even as growth in human population slows. Today, we do not measure a robot’s capacity to do work in terms of the number of humans it replaces. But that is how the metric of “horsepower” was devised in the eighteenth century to market steam engines, which replaced horses. Today, horses are show pieces whilst engines are everywhere. If robots increase by eight per cent per year over the next eighty years, their numbers will exceed the entire global human workforce today.

Third, selective but significant application of useful life extension practices can make “retirement”, or “old age”, redundant for those few deemed necessary for society or those with the financial power to access “forever” life. Social media already peddles advice on age reversal practices. Everlasting useful life and robotic advances weaken the incentive for population growth.

Humans — or a rarified, self-selected segment thereof — will continue to be in charge even in the age of robotics. But it is uncertain whether the deeply ingrained belief in inviolability of human life — a fundamental compact across humans — will continue to be relevant once their usefulness in the process of production becomes marginal.

Humanity might perversely go to great lengths to seek out the best and the brightest to be feted and preserved. But the primacy afforded in law today to human life and dignity might lose its salience alongside a quiet burial of the axiom of equity. Unlike the specific cases of war crimes and genocide, “crimes against humanity” are not prosecuted under a specific UN treaty and countries adopt transactional approaches. South Africa took Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over alleged genocide in Gaza, and the United States responded vengefully by threatening to exclude South Africa from its upcoming G-20 presidency in 2026.

How resilient will the “civilised” bonds of humanity, as enshrined in our Constitution and international laws, prove to be when faced with the predicament that much of humanity is surplus or past their “use by” date? It is the fashion today to emphasise that there will be no net job loss from AI. McKinsey, a consultancy, uses the blithe phrase that jobs will be affected but not work. But what about job holders? How many will be able to make the transition to new skill sets? The “new jobs” might be spatially far removed from where the old jobs are lost. Most job seekers are local and seamless migration — particularly across borders — no longer seems feasible. The sensible thing might be to end the tax advantages for capital investment and subsidise human employment, and if that fails, to intrusively regulate the extent of substitution of humans by machines. So, will it be back to the high noon of State controls and human-centric development as practised by left-of-centre governments?

Elon Musk envisions that no one should save for a rainy day, because the State will provide a “high universal wage” to all. A vision which, paradoxically, juxtaposes a “big” State with elevated levels of production efficiency and government savings (a never experienced before combination) such that a river of riches would flow from the government to the people.

If robots are around the corner, India can still cope, because the total fertility rate is already below the replacement rate and the population will peak in 2060 — though north of the Deccan, fertility rates remain high and need to be tapered aggressively via gender empowerment and skill development. Also, the tech paranoia is a bit premature. The dinosaurs were dominant for 252 million years, the mammals for sixty-six million years. Humans have been in the hot seat for just 0.2 million years.

We still have time to get our ducks in a row before it becomes time to pack up.

The writer is Distinguished Fellow, Chintan Research Foundation, and was earlier with the IAS and the World Bank