The food industry’s history offers lessons for AI development today. In the 1960s, Norman Borlaug and MS Swaminathan led the Green Revolution, which saved many lives. However, the industry later prioritized profits over health. Now, AI faces a similar path, as the focus shifted to winning rather than human well-being.
We are all watching the AI drama unfold. One day we are told it will cure every disease; the next, that it will extinguish our species. Having spent four decades in the food industry, I cannot shake the feeling of having seen this movie before. AI is walking along the path of an older revolution, one that India knows better than most.
In the 1960s, serious people predicted that hundreds of millions would starve in the 1970s, and India was the case they pointed to. Then Norman Borlaug bred a wheat that broke the old rules: short, stiff-stalked, disease-resistant and wildly productive. He carried it to the Indian sub-continent, and with MS Swaminathan by his side, put it in our soil. Wheat harvests leapt by some 60 per cent in five years. A region bracing for famine fed itself instead. The Green Revolution is credited, by many accounts, with saving on the order of a billion lives worldwide.
At its centre was a purpose, not a market opportunity, stated out loud: no one should starve. The science and the tools simply followed.
Then came the shadow. Once the mission was accomplished, the industry built to grow calories at scale learned to strip nutrients from food instead and sell them back as an innovation. Food was subtracted: the bran, the germ, the fibre was taken out. Non-food was added: colour, flavour, emulsifiers and preservatives. And in a final flourish, food was fortified, the stripped nutrients added back in trace amounts and printed on the pack as a virtue. India now lives with the result.
The ICMR-INDIAB study counts some 101 million Indians with diabetes and another 136 million with pre-diabetes. Nobody set out to make us sick. They industry fed us, succeeded beyond their dreams, and then let the market forces steer them.
Casting a shadow
A shining purpose did cast a long shadow. Now AI is casting a shadow before the light.
Where is AI’s Borlaug & Swaminathan? We find dazzling AI capability attached to no stated end larger than itself. We find valuations, and a race. In September, the presidents of the US and China met in Washington with high AI stakes on the table, and the loudest voices had already told us the point: to win. Not to make us wiser. Not to make us well. To win.
AI belongs on a precious list with fire, language, writing and the printing press. When the tribe gathered around the first fire, it did not organise the conversation around the chance that someone gets burnt. It asked what fire makes possible, and then dealt with the burns.
We have brought an extinguisher to the discovery of fire with no stated purpose. And a purpose left blank does not stay blank. It gets filled by the strongest incentive in the room: market share, national advantage, mind-bending wealth.
AI is doing to thought what industry did to wheat. It subtracts the effort of thinking, the struggle of wrestling with a problem till it yields. That is the bran and the germ of the mind, where judgment grows. A student who never sits in the discomfort of not knowing, a doctor who never reasons her way to a diagnosis: each is handed polished grain with the living part stripped out.
Then it adds confidence, like a tomato picked green is gassed red for the shelf. Then it fortifies. Now with added intelligence. The label never asks what was taken out to make room for it.
Self-certification
The safeguard on offer is one the food industry knows well: self-certification. In America it is called GRAS, “generally recognised as safe”, and it lets a manufacturer declare its own additive safe. After a White House meeting in September, the US President announced that AI companies had agreed to “police themselves”. I have seen that movie, too.
India is unusually placed to ask the better question. In February, the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi ended with 88 countries and international organisations adopting the New Delhi Declaration, guided by the principle Sarvajan Hitaya, Sarvajan Sukhaya: the welfare of all, the happiness of all. That is closer to a Borlaug-sized purpose than anything said in Washington. The task now is to make it the steering, not a slogan.
So my ask is modest: Let’s state the purpose out loud for AI. And It cannot be a negative. Borlaug’s purpose was never “prevent famine” spoken in fear. It was “feed the world” spoken in hope. AI needs something on that order: to extend the human mind rather than replace it.
We fed the world and forgot to ask what we were feeding it and why. Let us not repeat, with the human mind, the mistake we made with the human body. The AI machines are new, but the question is not. What is this fire for?