The Unseen Hand: Power and Poverty in the Age of AI

The Unseen Hand: Power and Poverty in the Age of AI

Rahul Ramya

23 May 2024, India

Who is in control when using a digital app or AI-driven app? This is an unanswered question for many, especially those who have no access to the algorithms that dictate how these apps function. Even chatting with a bot can lead to dead ends. Dehumanized interactions with these automated, invisible entities often force you to either accept their responses or get stuck. In essence, dealing with them can make you feel like you've been reduced to invisible data.

Most of the politicians and economists fail to understand the poverty as they have never lived with the poor and experienced their life and their hardships. If someone is really interested in eradicating poverty from Indian rural and urban settings she/he must spend time with them in their dwelling settings.

While dealing with AI these poor people are absent from the framework and they are not even considered as something like data point. They are even absent from the identity of existence of nations. People who are hungry, workless having nothing in the name of education and health are missing people from national scenes. They are not even considered worthy of being called voters. Such people have no place in the growth story of AI and they are just worthy of being ginni pigs in the growth of AI.

For a nation to alleviate poverty it’s sovereignty in the field of technology is very important. It’s nuanced requires to make a the state power dominate over private party’s colonial tech policies but such goals are not easy to achieve as AI technology is more costly than even the earlier costliest technologies. In such a situation nations are in dilemma of their sovereignty, their poverty and their technological needs. For example try to find the nuances of how can data collected by ASHA workers for some foreign or Indian AI companies with the help of government facilities which are coolected in some clouds of Google or Microsoft or AWS go to enrich people of already wealthy tech classes and provide better health facilities to those who belong to the richer sections at the expense of the poor and marginalised people who are quite unable to get benifits from their own health data due to high cost of AI enabled health services. 

Similarly these poor sections of the society do not find their places in the technology ridden public policies where they are dehumanised to the extent that they are nearly treated as numbers in some data. Numerical values of the poverty do not actually represent or tell the real sufferings of the poor people , their disempowerment , their illiteracy , their dehumanised living conditions. Pain of poverty can and consequent dehumanisation of individuals push such individuals to live like herds of cattle and no system of data analysis or AI intervention can fathom the depth of pain , disempowerment and dehumanisation of individuals and no rich data can explain these sorts of marginalisation of the poor individuals.

However if AI is well integrated with the scientific researches, economics of the poor and social policies of the nature of the public good it’s going to change the poverty landscape for better. AI has potential to help alleviate poverty when integrated with scientific research, economics and social policies. Examples include using AI to improve agricultural yields, provide financial access, and deliver education to underserved communities.

In summary, while AI holds promises, its development and deployment must be guided by the needs of the poor and a commitment to reducing inequality. Sovereignty in technology is important for a nation to shape AI for the public good. With the right approach, AI could be a powerful tool in the fight against poverty in India