With Donald Trump’s coercive policies brazenly trampling the interests of other countries, business leaders have begun to talk about harsh eventualities that once seemed very unlikely.
In a post on social media, industrialist Harsh Goenka had his followers imagine the consequences if the US President were to ban India from using Google, Instagram, Facebook or ChatGPT.
This is a hypothetical scenario, but a whimsical leader in the White House has made even tail risks worth examining. While Goenka wondered aloud if we had a Plan B, Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu weighed in, noting that India’s tech dependence went beyond that to operating systems and chips; he advocates a 10-year “National Mission for Tech Resilience.”
To be sure, India is a market that’s too big to lose, Big Tech’s interests are not easy for any US leader to brush aside and our relations with the US could yet improve. But then, many assumptions have fallen apart this year and it may thus be prudent to run a broad tech vulnerability scan.
This is an apt moment for another reason too: AI looks set to enmesh itself in our lives as a general-purpose technology. And in many fields, AI self-reliance is vital from a strategic perspective.