In 2020, I was designing NDMS, the pan-India cloud-based news gathering system for Akashvani and Doordarshan. One decision point became central to the entire architecture, “Should machine translation auto-publish news across India’s regional languages, or should every single item pass through a human Information Services Officer first?”
Speed argued for automation. The risk of fake news insertion, rapid propagation across regional languages, and translation errors that could distort meaning in ways no algorithm would catch, argued otherwise. I chose authentication over speed and built NDMS where every news item is manually verified before it reaches a citizen in any of India’s languages.
That was a small decision inside a government system. But the same choice seems central to our entire civilisation, at infinitely larger scale, with infinitely higher stakes.
And here not just Jobs, but lives are at stake. In November 2024, Suchir Balaji, a 26-year-old former OpenAI researcher who had gone public with concerns that the company broke copyright law to train its AI, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment. His parents have disavowed the conclusion of authorities and have publicly stated, repeatedly and on record, their belief that their son was killed for what he knew. They have filed a wrongful death lawsuit alleging tampering with surveillance footage and obstruction of the investigation. Sam Altman, when asked, said it looked like a suicide to him.
What I want to name here is the civilisational moment it represents. A whistleblower raised concerns about how a powerful technology company built its product. He died a month later. His own parents do not believe the official story. And the public conversation moved on within weeks, because the technology kept shipping regardless.
The Bhagavad Gita’s sixteenth chapter offers a framework I am developing further in my upcoming work. It describes two inherited natures in every person and every institution. Daivik Sampada, the divine qualities of truthfulness, restraint, and fearlessness in service of what is right. Asurik Sampada, the demonic qualities of hypocrisy, arrogance, and the pursuit of power without conscience. And civilisations, like a person, become whatever nature it consistently chooses under pressure.
A technological civilisation built entirely on Asurik Sampada optimises for speed, scale, and shareholder value, and treats truth, dignity, and human life as variables to be managed around. A technological civilisation built on Daivik Sampada asks a harder, slower question before every deployment. What does this do to a human being’s capacity to trust, to know what is real, to remain safe?
My NDMS decision was small but the principle inside it was not. Choose Daivik Sampada at the architecture level, before the product ships, or inherit Asurik Sampada’s consequences after it does. What does your organisation choose when speed and truth compete for the same deadline?
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