Former UK prime minister Rishi Sunak said at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in New Delhi on Thursday that India’s public debate about artificial intelligence was “incredibly positive” compared with the more negative debate in the West and the United States. He warned that public distrust could become a bigger barrier to AI development and adoption than technology itself. “In the West, it is trust, not technology, that threatens to be our limiting factor,” he said, arguing that people need to see how AI can empower them rather than replace or harm them.

Sunak said discussion should shift from the race to build the most advanced systems, including artificial general intelligence (AI capable of a broad range of intellectual tasks), to what he called “everyday AI”: spreading AI’s benefits through businesses, public services and society. A country’s economic success depends on how widely it adopts technology, he said, citing the printing press: Johannes Gutenberg invented it in 15th-century Germany, while the Dutch Republic gained economic value through publishing, financial markets and a more permissive printing environment. “The biggest winners are going to be those countries, those companies, those organizations that adopt, adopt, adopt,” he said. He pointed to India’s digitally literate workforce, digital public infrastructure, startup ecosystem, low-cost solutions, Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and domestic AI businesses. He also said India had recently overtaken the UK to rank third in a Stanford University ranking of global AI powers; the article says the ranking and methodology need checking against the underlying report.

Sunak said public consent was essential to AI development and warned that opposition could grow quickly if people thought AI threatened jobs or caused harm. He pointed to growing political opposition to data centres in the US and said that without democratic consent, having enough computing capacity would not enable deployment in a free society. Waiting for a major AI accident before agreeing safeguards could provoke public backlash and sweeping regulation that might slow development and deployment, he said. He argued that AI safety and progress should advance together.

He said AI could provide lower-cost solutions in agriculture, healthcare and education. As an example, he cited Mindspark, an education programme developed in India that he said serves half a million pupils across India and Africa through personalised lessons; its students had doubled their rate of learning. According to Sunak, the programme can run on a simple tablet with preloaded content, without high-speed broadband or expensive computers, drawing on years of research and billions of student interactions. He said such applications could extend services previously available mainly to wealthier households and improve productivity while widening access to benefits.

Sunak compared AI’s potential impact with the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment and the printing press. Referring to estimates by Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis, he said AI could have 10 times the impact of the Industrial Revolution in half the time. Sunak called AI “the biggest transfer of knowledge in human history” and compared adoption timelines: 70 years for the telephone, 50 years for electricity, 15 years for personal computers, seven years for the internet and two months for ChatGPT to reach the milestone he referenced. He said this speed makes safeguards and broad deployment more urgent, and described AI as a tool that could help people discover and create tools and improve their lives.

Former UK prime minister Rishi Sunak said at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in New Delhi on Thursday that India’s public debate about artificial intelligence was “incredibly positive” compared with the more negative debate in the West and the United States. He warned that public distrust could become a bigger barrier to AI development and adoption than technology itself. “In the West, it is trust, not technology, that threatens to be our limiting factor,” he said, arguing that people need to see how AI can empower them rather than replace or harm them.

Sunak said discussion should shift from the race to build the most advanced systems, including artificial general intelligence (AI capable of a broad range of intellectual tasks), to what he called “everyday AI”: spreading AI’s benefits through businesses, public services and society. A country’s economic success depends on how widely it adopts technology, he said, citing the printing press: Johannes Gutenberg invented it in 15th-century Germany, while the Dutch Republic gained economic value through publishing, financial markets and a more permissive printing environment. “The biggest winners are going to be those countries, those companies, those organizations that adopt, adopt, adopt,” he said. He pointed to India’s digitally literate workforce, digital public infrastructure, startup ecosystem, low-cost solutions, Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and domestic AI businesses. He also said India had recently overtaken the UK to rank third in a Stanford University ranking of global AI powers; the article says the ranking and methodology need checking against the underlying report.

Sunak said public consent was essential to AI development and warned that opposition could grow quickly if people thought AI threatened jobs or caused harm. He pointed to growing political opposition to data centres in the US and said that without democratic consent, having enough computing capacity would not enable deployment in a free society. Waiting for a major AI accident before agreeing safeguards could provoke public backlash and sweeping regulation that might slow development and deployment, he said. He argued that AI safety and progress should advance together.

He said AI could provide lower-cost solutions in agriculture, healthcare and education. As an example, he cited Mindspark, an education programme developed in India that he said serves half a million pupils across India and Africa through personalised lessons; its students had doubled their rate of learning. According to Sunak, the programme can run on a simple tablet with preloaded content, without high-speed broadband or expensive computers, drawing on years of research and billions of student interactions. He said such applications could extend services previously available mainly to wealthier households and improve productivity while widening access to benefits.

Sunak compared AI’s potential impact with the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment and the printing press. Referring to estimates by Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis, he said AI could have 10 times the impact of the Industrial Revolution in half the time. Sunak called AI “the biggest transfer of knowledge in human history” and compared adoption timelines: 70 years for the telephone, 50 years for electricity, 15 years for personal computers, seven years for the internet and two months for ChatGPT to reach the milestone he referenced. He said this speed makes safeguards and broad deployment more urgent, and described AI as a tool that could help people discover and create tools and improve their lives.