Founding Fuel

Every Country Is Adopting AI. Very Few Are Asking What Kind.

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Every great leap forward casts a shadow. We just rarely look at it.

History has a pattern. The printing press gave us the Reformation and the pamphlet. It also gave us the propaganda leaflet. The compass opened up trade routes and the age of discovery. It also opened up the age of colonisation. Gunpowder lit up fireworks and festivities. And battlefields. Transformative technologies always carry a shadow story, a disruption running quietly beneath the triumphant narrative. The people living through the transformation rarely see it. They are too busy celebrating the light.

We are, right now, in the middle of one such transformation.

Artificial Intelligence is having its summit moment. The India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi brought together the luminaries, the announcements, the investments in data centres and cloud infrastructure, the excitement of a country positioning itself as a global hub. All of it warranted. All of it real.

And running quietly alongside it — almost in the shadow of it — was a different kind of conversation.

In January 2026, a closed-door strategic dialogue was convened at the India International Centre in New Delhi. NatStrat, in partnership with Strategic Foresight Group and Founding Fuel, brought together voices from national security, science, policy and academia. Not to celebrate AI. To interrogate it.

The dialogue produced a special policy report — India’s AI Gambit: Navigating the Global Race — and a rich public record in video and writing. Founding Fuel has curated the most consequential ideas from this conversation in two pieces worth reading carefully: India’s AI Gambit: The Choices That Will Define Power and India’s AI Moment by Ambassador Pankaj Saran.

The shadow, it turns out, tells quite a bit about what is coming.

The Arguments Worth Sitting With

The central provocation from this dialogue is deceptively simple: every country is adopting AI, but very few are asking what kind of AI power they want to become.

Most of the public conversation — including most of what you will hear at summits — concentrates on the consumption side. AI for productivity. AI for inclusion. AI for efficiency. 

These are real and important. And they are not the whole story.

Ambassador Pankaj Saran, former Deputy National Security Adviser and Convenor of NatStrat, writes in India’s AI Moment: “In both the United States and China, the centre of gravity in artificial intelligence is moving beyond consumer-facing applications and productivity tools. Increasing emphasis is being placed on advanced AI systems designed to accelerate scientific discovery and strengthen national security.”

The US has its Genesis Mission, coordinated by the Department of Energy, using AI for discovery science with national security implications. China, through the Chinese Academy of Sciences and related institutions, is pursuing the same territory — science and security, tightly integrated. The race is not just about who has the better chatbot. It is about who rewrites the rules of biology, chemistry and strategic power.

Sundeep Waslekar, President of Strategic Foresight Group, put it plainly at the dialogue: “The US and China are building AI for scientific discovery — new rules in biology and chemistry. They fear falling behind in science. We think we are doing fine.”

That last sentence carries some weight. The assumption that we are doing fine, while others are asking harder questions, is precisely the kind of complacency that history tends to punish slowly and then all at once.

Why These Voices Matter

Here is what I want you to notice about the people in this conversation.

They are not selling anything. They are not vendors of technology with a price attached. They are not optimising for applause at a summit.

Alok Joshi, Chairman of the National Security Advisory Board, spoke about building “assurance systems” and the balance between sovereignty and trusted outreach in diplomacy. Air Marshal S. P. Dharkar (Retd.), former Vice Chief of the Air Staff, articulated the governance tension plainly: “Centralised control. Decentralised execution. Without coherence, we fragment. Without flexibility, we slow down.”

Dr. V. K. Saraswat, Member of NITI Aayog and former Director General of DRDO, noted: “Strategic autonomy does not mean isolation. AI thrives on collaboration. The challenge is balancing openness with control.”

These are people whose professional lives have been spent thinking about consequences — national, institutional, long-term. The kind of thinking that is rarely represented in the summit stage lineup, and almost never in the LinkedIn posts celebrating AI’s potential.

When people like this sit in a room and say we need to think more carefully, it is worth slowing down and listening.

The Scenarios Ahead

What happens if we do not ask these questions? A few possibilities, none of them dramatic, all of them consequential.

The first is the talent and capability gap. If the world’s leading nations are deploying AI for scientific discovery — new materials, new drugs, new energy sources — and we are primarily deploying it for productivity and use cases, the gap between AI-as-tool and AI-as-power widens. 

We become very good consumers of a future that others are building.

The second is the governance vacuum. AI is interdisciplinary, as Dr. Preeti Banzal of the Principal Scientific Adviser’s office noted at the dialogue. One rule cannot govern all of it. Sectoral regulators need to adapt, coordinated through a whole-of-government approach. Without this, the default is fragmentation — or worse, governance that arrives after the disruption rather than before it.

The third is the sovereignty question. Advanced AI systems have already demonstrated the ability to generate hazardous knowledge in chemistry and biology, to interact with critical decision-support systems, to reshape cyber resilience. As Ambassador Saran writes, “questions of control, accountability and unintended escalation become increasingly salient.” These are not alarmist scenarios. They are the sober assessments of people with clearances and consequences.

The disruption of lives that AI will bring is as certain as its benefits. The printing press did not ask permission before upending the church’s monopoly on knowledge. Gunpowder did not pause for governance frameworks. The question is not whether disruption will come. It is whether we will have thought about it before or after.

What You Can Do

If you are reading this as a professional, a leader, a curious person trying to make sense of the moment — here is what I think is worth your attention.

Read the primary sources. Not the summaries. Not the LinkedIn posts. Read the Founding Fuel pieces. Watch the full dialogue on YouTube. The policy report by Strategic Foresight Group is available as a PDF. These are not long. They are dense with things worth thinking about.

Ask the shadow question. Every time you encounter an AI claim — a product, a policy, a prediction — ask: what is this not saying? Who benefits? What gets disrupted? What governance is missing? This is not cynicism. It is literacy.

Count the costs alongside the benefits. The printing press, the compass, gunpowder — we inherited the full story, shadow and all. We are in the middle of writing this one. The people who shaped the earlier transformations were not the ones who celebrated the loudest. They were the ones who thought the hardest.

The AI summit had its lights. Bright and real and warranted.

The shadow conversation happened quietly, in a room at the India International Centre, with people who spend their lives thinking about what comes next.

Both deserve your attention.

The shadow, especially.

If this resonated, you might enjoy A Small Defence Of Thinking — on why slowing down to think is its own kind of courage.

What a Life Touches

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I never met Ramki Sreenivasan. Yet I’ve heard his name often enough from friends and colleagues for him to feel familiar in the background. Like someone whose work you recognise before you recognise the face. I’ve read his writing, followed his work from a distance, and mourned his passing quietly.

Reading NS Ramnath’s piece on Founding Fuel, and seeing the images from the award instituted in his name, made me pause. Not as much in sorrow as much in meaning and celebration. A life like his leaves a long trail. For people, for places, and for everything that flies, swims, crawls, or blooms.

The Founding Fuel link below gives greater context to this piece.

The award created in his name is not just a reminder of his work. It is a quiet act of love from his family and friends, who continue to keep his spirit alive in the field he cared about.

Ramki treated conservation as serious work. It needed persuasion, evidence, and courage. He didn’t photograph wild places as a hobby. He helped protect them. The tools were cameras and lenses, but the work was closer to activism.

A reminder of that impact came from an unexpected place: a tribute from Neiphiu Rio, the Chief Minister of Nagaland.

Condolence letter from Nagaland’s Chief Minister

Political leaders rarely stop their day to acknowledge conservationists. Nature seldom makes it to the official list of people politics thanks. So when a state leader publicly honours a man who helped protect migratory birds, it says something about the work. And the scale of it.

The Cost We Forgot to Count

The damage we do to the environment is often invisible to us. We track inflation, GDP, stock indices, petrol prices. We complain about shrinkflation in our biscuit packets. But we don’t notice the shrinkflation of habitats. Forests thinning. Rivers narrowing. Skies losing their travellers. There is no mainstream index that measures the cost of losing forests, wetlands, or birds. It is a bill we are already paying. We have just settled for not seeing the invoice.

We don’t see ecological loss because it rarely comes as one dramatic event. It shows up quietly: fewer bird calls in the morning, a river that smells different, a fruit that no longer grows where it once did. These changes arrive disguised as “development” or “progress.” And because they don’t show up in quarterly earnings or political slogans, we treat them as background noise. By the time we notice, the damage is already permanent.

That’s where lives like Ramki’s shift perspective. They remind us that conservation is not fringe activism. It’s maintenance. It keeps the world in working order so that both people and wildlife can live with dignity. If the forests fall silent, we lose an entire vocabulary of life.

Small choices matter too. The plastic bag we refuse. The holiday we plan differently. A school project about migratory birds instead of zoo favourites. Culture changes through small, repeated acts of responsibility. And through teaching our children to relate to the planet as a neighbour they share life with.

Ramki’s life and work set a benchmark. This is a call to match his stance, not his scale. Most of us will not save a neighbourhood, let alone a species. But we can choose not to help erase one. That is a modest place to start, and perhaps the most honest one. 

Some lives add noise.
Some add followers.
A few quietly make the world better.

Those are the ones worth paying attention to.

Here is the Founding Fuel essay by NS Ramnath for more context and links to Ramki’s work

India’s Progress: Poverty Fell While the Doomsday Clock Ticked Closer

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The world feels heavy with crisis—wars, climate disasters, and a growing sense that things are falling apart. But here’s something worth paying attention to: India has made remarkable progress in reducing poverty. Over the last few decades, millions have moved out of extreme poverty, quietly reshaping the country’s economic landscape.

This isn’t just a feel-good statistic. It’s hard evidence that things can get better, even in challenging times.

And Yet, the Doomsday Clock Ticks Closer

Despite such progress, the Doomsday Clock, that dramatic symbol of how close we are to global catastrophe, was reset to 89 seconds to midnight this year. It has barely moved—stuck at 100 seconds for years, then 90, now 89. The change is cosmetic, not meaningful.

At a Founding Fuel Masterclass on The World in 2025, Sundeep Waslekar called this reset a cop-out. He argues that the real number should be closer to 60 seconds. He pointed to a joint article by Prince Hassan of Jordan, advocating for a sharper reset.

But while the world debates whether catastrophe is inevitable, there’s another story playing out—one of real, measurable progress. One that gives me hope amidst all the gloom and doom.

India’s Role in Reducing Poverty

A recent study by Armentano, Niehaus, and Vogl found that global extreme poverty fell from 44% in 1981 to just 9% in 2019—and India played a huge role in that shift. The study found that 57% of those who started in poverty in rural India managed to escape it—one of the highest exit rates among all countries surveyed.

How Did India Do It?

Some long-held assumptions don’t hold up. The study found that:

  1. People didn’t need to switch careers. Most who escaped poverty kept working in the same industry, improving gradually rather than making risky jumps.
  2. Moving to cities wasn’t the golden ticket. Rural-to-urban migration wasn’t a major factor, and in some cases, rural-to-rural moves worked better.
  3. Self-employment was key. Unlike in Mexico or South Africa, where wage jobs mattered more, in India, self-employment played the biggest role in lifting people out of poverty.

Handouts Helped, But Progress Was Broader

Government support, cash transfers, and aid helped cushion families from falling back into poverty. The study found that when people slipped below the poverty line, social protection measures often softened the blow and gave them a fighting chance to recover.

But the biggest long-term gains came from economic activity—steady income, better opportunities, and gradual improvements in livelihoods. India’s 1991 economic liberalization, expansion of micro-businesses, small-scale farming improvements, and informal work created conditions for many to climb out of poverty while staying in familiar trades.

What’s the Big Takeaway?

Poverty isn’t a static trap. People move in and out of it constantly. The good news? In India, more people have been moving up than down.

The Doomsday Clock may be ticking, but time isn’t running out just yet. The world has seen real progress—and with the right focus, there’s more to be done.

Read the full study [here]. It’s messy, surprising, and hopeful.

Progress doesn’t stop—and neither should we.

A book & an open road

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Decades ago, as we tossed empty ideas into the evening air, my dad jumped to reach a book from his collection. He passed it my way with a flourish and care that he reserved for books he had a special affection for.

The cover said “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert Pirsig. I thought it was a bag of tricks that would stop my incessant trips to the mechanic (and the consequent demands it had on his frayed wallet). But within a few minutes I spotted in the foreword: “It’s not very factual on motorcycles, either.” That was indication enough that what was to come was not as much of a trip to the garage as much as my seeking debates with dad.

Pirsig passed away last week. It caused me to dust off the dog-eared book and go over several underlined passages and random remarks with a firmer handwriting. Pirsig’s account of a motorcycle trip across America with his 11-year-old son and two other friends was not so much a travelogue as it was a treatise. As a young man, the allure of the bike and the open road held together the space for my exploration of his deeper musings. I remember reading and rereading the book. In part for what it offered, but also because I wasn’t able to comprehend all that it offered at one go.

It was much later that I learnt that the book had sold a million copies in the first year and that Pirsig had spent time in Asia (and India) as well. It suddenly seemed to hold greater potency than it had struck me as having when I first read it. The book was published in 1974 but its meandering conversations stand as a poignant pointer for us to examine our world and the times we live in today as well.

The book is set in the ’60s and ’70s. When America and the world was coming to terms with all the scientific advancements and the entirety of its consequences: industrialisation, mass production and other aftermaths including the hippie culture.

One particular incident from the book has stayed with me. Where the narrator takes the motorcycle to the mechanics and is left with a less than happy experience. To put it mildly.

It dawned on me then that a mere mastery over tools is as incomplete an experience as thinking of a home as just bricks and concrete. A home is defined by those who live in it. Similarly much of meaning emerges from our approach to our tools, our work and our lives. Just tools or a mere mastery over them takes us a good distance but it doesn’t complete the journey.

Many pages are devoted to the idea of ‘quality’ in the book. Quality as an unseen yet omnipresent way of working and living. (And not as a limited measure of a person, product or process.) The dusting off of the book brought me front and square with several aspects that have continued to stay with me, both consciously and otherwise: the criticality of the whole self, the heft in exploration and the need to reflect on the lenses we use to view the world around us, etc. But the most important elements, I realise, are the importance of nuance and the need to expand our horizons through reflection, dialogue and conversation.

Nuance, diversity and dialogue have been at the core of several things that we do at Founding Fuel. Take for instance the stellar conversation my colleague NS Ramnath has had with Nicholas Agar, author of The Sceptical Optimist. Do take the time to dive into the piece titled The Sceptical Optimist: A philosopher’s take on technological progress. There are several gems in there that made me pause and ponder over the inevitability of technological progress and the importance of comprehending its consequences.

Technology in the connected world of today is all pervasive. Having said that, both wholesome adoption or blind rejection of technology limit our living in these modern times. Deep questioning, dialogue and inclusive discussions are necessary. As Tom Brokaw said “… it will do us little good to wire the world if we short-circuit our souls”.

There is a heap of work to be done. Even as the spotlight remains trained on the tools and all the glamour associated with what they can do, there are other spaces that we need to train our attention on as well. Especially in the space where technology intersects with our lives and changes us and our societies forever. I will leave you with that thought.

The other thing that I want to leave you with is an invitation to stay connected here, and subscribe to Founding Fuel’s newsletter if you haven’t already. May I also invite you to have a conversation on the content here with someone you know. You never know where one conversation can lead you to.

In the spirit of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I am going to indulge myself by leaving you with three quotes from the book to mull over.

“‘What’s new?’ is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question ‘What is best?’”

“If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured, dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn’t enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what’s good.”

“The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”

 

This piece was first published here.