Short essay: Can technology serve human values, or must it shape them?

The question of whether technology can serve human values or must shape them sounds like a binary, but the honest answer is that it does both, and that the balance is not fixed by the technology itself. Every powerful instrument arrives with a default — a way of being used that follows the path of least resistance — and that default tends to shape the user as much as the user shapes the tool. Whether a society receives the technology on its own terms, or is reorganised around the technology's defaults, depends on choices made in design, in regulation and in education. Technology in itself is neither neutral nor sovereign; it is a partner in a relationship whose terms are negotiated.

The case for human primacy starts with a simple observation. Every technology that mattered in the last century — print, electricity, the telephone, the internet — was domesticated, over time, into purposes its inventors did not foresee and its users did. The printing press, designed for sacred texts, became the instrument of newspapers, novels and democratic deliberation. Electricity, designed for industrial production, became the substrate of domestic life. The internet, designed for academic file transfer, became a platform for commerce, friendship and protest. In each case, human purposes — pluralism, intimacy, expression — bent the technology to themselves over the course of a generation. There is no obvious reason to assume that artificial intelligence will be different in kind, even if it differs in speed.

The case for technological shaping is, however, also strong. The smartphone has reshaped the attention span of a generation of adolescents without any explicit decision to permit that reshaping. Social media has restructured political discourse around outrage and brevity, again without anyone choosing the trade-off. Recommendation algorithms have reshaped what we read, watch and buy in ways that aggregate to a different culture of consumption. None of these effects was inevitable; each was the product of design choices that prioritised engagement over deliberation. The cumulative drift shows how a widespread tool can move the values it appears merely to serve.

The Indian context tilts the balance towards intentional design. The country is at the receiving end of technologies built primarily for other markets, with defaults calibrated for cultural and regulatory environments different from its own. UPI, Aadhaar and the India Stack demonstrated that a society can deliberately build digital infrastructure around its own values — universal access, low cost, public accountability — rather than accept the defaults of platforms that have no such obligation. The lesson is replicable: the next wave of technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, can be domesticated to Indian linguistic, social and constitutional priorities if the design is undertaken consciously rather than imported by default.

The strongest counter-view is that any attempt to bend technology to existing values is conservatism in another costume — a refusal to allow technology to expose values that may themselves be obsolete. Slavery, caste hierarchy and patriarchal practice were once defended as values too; the steam engine, the railway and the contraceptive pill all helped to dissolve them. Why should the new wave not similarly correct the present generation's blind spots? The objection has force, and any defence of human primacy must accept that values themselves evolve under technological influence. The question is whether the evolution proceeds through deliberate human reflection or through algorithmic drift. The first is democratic; the second is not.

The conclusion is therefore conditional. Technology can serve human values when its design, regulation and use are subjected to ongoing democratic deliberation. It will shape those values, unhelpfully, when it is deployed at scale with defaults that no one has examined. The classroom of 2035, the workplace of 2040 and the courtroom of 2045 will each be infused with artificial intelligence; whether each remains recognisably human in its purposes depends on choices made now. A society that abdicates those choices to the platforms will find that the platforms have made them, and a society that asserts them will discover that technology, properly directed, can serve the deepest of its values.