A lawless bubble, or a human village?

"India AI Impact Summit 2026 concludes at Bharat Mandapam in Delhi...with strong Global Endorsement of India's responsible AI vision." "Electronics and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said the Simmit has been a grand success on many fronts," and "investment pledges have crossed $250 billion for the infra-related investments and about $20 billion for the VC deep tech investments which have been committed by investors." newsonair.gov.in. In this year's Union Budget the government has set aside Rs 10 billion, or about $120 million for its AI mission. But, "One Nvidia H100 GPU, which is essential for modern AI costs about $30,000 to $40,000." The US CHIPS Act provides $52 billion while the EU support is 1 billion euros. "Running a 100-megawatt AI facility will cost Rs 6 billion to Rs 8 billion a year just for electricity." Almost the entire AI budget, wrote Arindam Goswami. Google has just released its artificial general intelligence (AGI), Gemini, to rival OpenAI, as well as its latest Ironwood Tensor Processing Unit, capable of 4,614 T flops of peak computing power and 192GB of high-bandwith memory, wrote Nilesh Jasani. AI is a major bubble "going back to gold in the 1970s and the internet boom of the late 1990s." US "households hold 52% of their wealth in stocks, which is higher than the peak in 2000 and far above levels in EU (30%) Japan (20%) and UK (15%)." "This time, the debts are building on the govt ledger, thanks to record deficits - a major risk." "The result is a strange new animal: a fully invested bear," wrote Ruchir Sharma. "The kind of software presently called AI, more technically referred to as 'machine learning'," "is making unscrupulous use of vast troves of human behavior collected by 'social media' and equally lawless appropriation of copyrighted cultural material." The Chinese are using AI for "social control intended to make Chinese Communist Party authoritarianism absolute and permanent." Instead, "We need fully open, user-enabling AI applications that serve humans rather than replace them," wrote Mishi Choudhary & Eben Moglen. "Humans reason morally within shared systems of values shaped by history, culture and social interaction. Machines, by contrast, simulate responses based on patterns in training data." "However you look at it - it takes a village," soothed Celeste Rodriguez Louro. The real danger is that, "In 2024, India's data centers consumed an estimated 150 billion liters of water. By 2030, that figure will more than double," wrote Arunabha Ghosh. India's population is expected to be around 1.477 billion in 2026 (worldometer) and to rise to nearly 1.7 billion in 2050. With 17% of the world's population, "India has access to only 4% of global freshwater resources." TOI. "Excessive groundwater extraction in India, over 25% of world's total, has thrown the planet off balance, literally shifting it from its axis, says a new study." News18. AI may be safe but a human village needs freshwater. Who wins?