AI in India: Is it a prosperity engine or mobility killer?

History is not a catalogue of inventions. It is a record of how societies adapt—or fail to adapt—to them.Every major technological revolution has followed a similar arc. First comes the breakthrough.

Then the disruption. Then, if institutions evolve wisely, shared prosperity. If they do not, inequality hardens and social stress rises.

Artificial intelligence will be no different.Technology creates adaptive crises before shared prosperity: The first Industrial Revolution made Britain rich, but not quickly, and not for everyone. Early factories were brutal. Wages stagnated for decades even as output soared.

It took unionization, social safety nets and mass public education before productivity gains translated into broadly rising incomes.The lesson is clear: technology does not automatically produce prosperity. Institutions determine who benefits.If AI is deployed primarily to replace human labour and compress costs, productivity may rise while inequality widens. Erik Brynjolfsson calls this the “Turing Trap”—using AI to automate what humans already do rather than augmenting what humans could do better.

AI is not primarily a technology challenge. It is an adaptation challenge.Diffusion determines destiny: India has lived through two digital revolutions, and the contrast is instructive. In the 1990s and early 2000s, India rode the personal computer (PC) and internet wave.

We built global IT champions like Infosys and TCS. A world-class export sector emerged. But PC penetration remained narrow.

Broadband access was limited. The gains accrued largely to an urban, English-speaking elite.That was narrow diffusion. After 2011, mobile internet, cheap data and digital public infrastructure changed the equation.