Payal Arora On AI And Rest Of World

Arora is a digital anthropologist and Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University. She has spent 20 years conducting fieldwork among poor communities in countries including Brazil, India and Namibia, and wrote The Next Billion Users and From Pessimism to Promise. With her Bollywood background, she promised a degree of entertainment: 'If you let down your defence, knowledge has more impact.'

The West and the rest

The professor sees a growing divide in attitudes towards technology. In the West, the tone is becoming increasingly gloomy, to the point of paralysis. When she asks her students in Utrecht if they are pleased with AI, only 3 per cent raise their hands. The rest, she says, 'proudly hate it'. Elsewhere, however, she comes across what she calls 'optimism on steroids': billboards promoting AI lining motorways, and her mother who is convinced that 'Gemini knows all'.

This difference in attitudes can partly be explained by demographics. Around 90 per cent of the world's young people live outside the West. In countries like Kenya and India, nine out of ten young people are optimistic about the future. By 2030, 40 per cent of all young people worldwide will be living on the African continent. According to the professor, many of these countries are governed by people in their seventies who fail to recognise the opportunities offered by technology. Young people with no expectations of securing a government job or who have no desire to follow their father into farming increasingly believe that the creator economy on Instagram and TikTok is the path to a different future.

AI as a mirror

Arora warns against black-and-white thinking: pitting people against machines, or the state versus Big Tech. Only 14 per cent of all countries are liberal democracies. In many other parts of the world, Big Tech can at times provide the only meaningful counterweight to firmly established state authority. She refers to youth protests in India, where demonstrators use satire and Instagram Reels to challenge the government. According to Arora, the authorities are trying to silence them online, but Meta has refused to remove their accounts. 'So is Big Tech the good guy or the bad guy here?'

Concerns about new technologies are nothing new, the professor argues. When calculators were first introduced, teachers feared they would spell the end of mathematics. Rather than being the problem itself, AI holds up a mirror to society, reflecting how existing institutions fail to serve large groups of people, including older adults, children and rural communities.

Other work, not less work

Jobs are not disappearing on a massive scale; they are changing. In the legal sector, for instance, many people predicted that AI would mean the end of the profession as we know it. Instead, large numbers of people with no legal training are submitting cases drafted by ChatGPT, which large numbers of lawyers then have to review. Arora sees this as a form of democratisation, particularly in countries where millions of cases are still awaiting a hearing. 'Justice delayed is justice denied.' (delay itself is a form of injustice)

She believes the creative sector also has something to learn from the rest of the world. While Dutch creators are pressing for AI-free content, Arora points out that copyright has done little for the vast majority of creators. In China, short-form video has become a €2 billion industry. There, anyone can tell their story, even with no formal training in filmmaking.

Security through freedom

According to Arora, security is not an absolute value in itself, but a means of expanding freedom and protecting fundamental rights. Measures with good intentions often end up having unintended consequences. Cookie notices, she argues, have diluted the very concept of consent, while 98 per cent of people never read the general terms and conditions they are asked to accept. She likens the suggestion that people should make their profiles private to avoid online abuse to advising women to stay at home if they feel unsafe in public. 'The responsibility should lie with the perpetrators, not the victims.'

She also believes that Australia's ban on social media for children is not going to work. Children will simply circumvent it using VPNs, making their online activity less visible rather than safer. Meanwhile, her lab is working with Google to develop a protocol that detects deepfake pornography at an early stage. The solution, she says, is often far less dramatic than people imagine: encourage platforms such as Google and Meta to work together, just as they currently also do in tackling child sexual abuse material.

Reinventing institutions

By constantly telling women how unsafe AI is, you are more likely to put them off engaging with it, according to Arora. The Netherlands, too, has far fewer female AI entrepreneurs than male ones. 'The message to women is loud and clear: this isn't for you.'

Arora concluded her lecture by returning to the theme of sovereignty and asking a question: when have we truly reinvented our institutions since the Second World War? In her view, sovereignty should not be used as an excuse to shut down internet access during protests. She sees inspiration in digital public infrastructure, such as India Stack, and in small language models trained on local dialects and cultural contexts. So not more data, but better data.

For Arora, hope is therefore not naivety, but a moral obligation. The way we look to the future determines how we act.