Who’ll Bear Ecological and Public Health Costs
In February 2026, the Government of India convened the India AI (Artificial Intelligence) Impact Summit at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, bringing together government officials, tech corporations, and researchers to position India within global debates on AI. Organized under the IndiaAI Mission, the global summit promoted AI as a driver of development, public services, and technological leadership under the themes of “People, Planet, and Progress.”[1]
This push for AI unfolds during a geopolitical reconfiguration marked by US–Israel backed genocide in Palestine and Iran, imperialist attacks across the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa, and intensifying rivalry between the United States and China, all of which creates ripple effects across global trade and energy markets. Within this landscape in a rapidly collapsing planet, AI is becoming a strategic technology shaping military capacity, economic competition, and technological sovereignty. Here, science develops within the material conditions and relations of production of a given historical period and in turn reproduces those conditions. To understand the emerging AI order—and what it means for India—we must therefore trace the political economy and history of AI and computer science.
At the February 2026 AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, CEOs from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic stood alongside Modi and other state leaders, holding hands. The image was telling: a coordinated alignment between states and tech corporations—a kind of emerging techno-imperial bloc. Today, companies like Anthropic market systems such as Claude as “ethical AI,” presenting AI as a careful, human-aligned technology emerging from responsible innovation. At the same time, mainstream narratives, as mentioned in a recent analysis, suggest that the military is now reaching into Silicon Valley to adapt civilian technologies for warfare[2]. The actual history runs exactly in the opposite direction. Many of the foundational technologies behind the digital economy—including networked computing, the internet, and early AI research—developed through military programs and public research funding long before they became the basis of commercial tech platforms. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), an independent research and development agency within the U.S. Department of War (DoW), itself says its AI work goes back to the 1960s and credits its R&D with early AI successes, while the Pentagon’s contemporary AI contracting has expanded sharply since Project Maven of 2017, an AI drone surveillance program.[3] In other words, AI and computer science were never simply civilian fields later pulled into war; military research was foundational to the field, and today’s dual-use pipelines are merely an extension of that history.
But even this is not the beginning. To understand why computing and AI took this form, we must go further back—first to the social history of algorithms, and then to nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. People have long used counting, record-keeping, and coordination systems to organize labor and manage resources. Thus, algorithms have always been social tools for restructuring work, knowledge, and authority. What changes under industrial capitalism is that these tools are reorganized at scale to serve empire’s need for colonial control. Charles Babbage was working in industrial England where steam power was reorganizing production and the British Empire depended on navigation, trade, and colonial expansion. His calculating machine emerged from these conditions: it was designed to produce the mathematical tables required for maritime commerce and built using the same mechanical systems (steam power) and workshop labor that powered the factory. Science here does not stand apart from society. It arises from existing material conditions and, in turn, reproduces and stabilizes them. Computation, thereby, emerges within this process, carrying the logics of industrial production—precision, standardization, control, and scalability—embedded in it historically and materially. [4]
Marx saw this clearly. Along with physical labor, machines replaced memory, judgment, and decision-making. The collective intelligence produced through cooperation—what Marx called the general intellect—was increasingly captured as “machine intelligence.” The question, then, is who controls the knowledge we collectively produce, and whether it will serve profit and domination or social need and emancipation. [5]
That is why the question of AI is as political as it is technical. The current AI moment sits inside a wider geopolitical reordering driven by war, mineral extraction, energy chokepoints, and infrastructure struggles. The material base of AI begins with mining: cobalt, lithium, rare earth elements, and other critical minerals—much of it extracted from Africa and Latin America—form the backbone of semiconductors, batteries, and data center hardware. Yet, as with earlier extractive regimes, regions that supply these materials capture little of the value, due to ecological destruction, labor exploitation, and conflict.[6]
Since late February, the U.S-Israel imperial attacks have disrupted the Strait of Hormuz, damaged oil and gas infrastructure in the Gulf countries, and plundered Venezuelan oil effectively destabilizing the regions central to global energy supply.[7] Data centers require vast and continuous electricity, and disruptions in oil and gas flows reverberate across global markets, influencing where AI infrastructure can be built and sustained. The construction of AI infrastructure depends on stable energy certainly, but also on predictable returns, and secure political conditions. The Gulf region reflects this contradiction sharply. Oil wealth is being converted into AI infrastructure through investments in data centers and cloud systems, while the region remains ecologically constrained (relying on energy-intensive desalination and experimental cooling systems) and mired in military conflict and dependent security arrangements.[8] Conveniently, US tech firms are expanding into India, alongside deepening India–Israel defense ties, incorporating India into a broader technological and military architecture[9].
For India, the alleged tech sovereignty may instead only be a new form of dependency, where infrastructure and labor are local, but strategic control and direction remain external. The ecological and health costs, however, are borne locally in one of the world’s most densely populated regions.
What emerges from this look intot past and present, concerns the direction for humanity and the planet’s future. Two propositions follow. First, from a labor perspective: organizing must begin from reclaiming our collective knowledge, asserting control over how it is produced, used, and distributed. Second, from a political economy perspective: AI infrastructure follows the alignment of energy, finance capital, and geopolitical power. Taken together, these point beyond narrow demands for regulation or “ethical AI.” They call for a broader civilizational shift—one that reorients science and technology away from profit, militarization, and endless extraction, and toward collective planning, ecological balance, and sustainable human development. The task ahead is not simply to govern AI, but to transform the conditions under which knowledge is produced and reproduced.
( The author is a PhD candidate in Indiana University-Bloomington, USA )
[1] “India AI Impact Summit 2026,” India AI Impact Summit 2026, , https://ai-impact-summit.vercel.app.
[2] Gary Wilson, “Anthropic Is Already at War - MR Online,” March 9, 2026, https://mronline.org/2026/03/09/anthropic-is-already-at-war/.
[3] “AI Next Campaign | DARPA,” , https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/ai-next-campaign.
[4] Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso Books, 2023)
[5] Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973), 383–423; Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin/New Left Review, 1976), 492–507.
[6] “Critical Minerals, Critical Moment: Africa’s Role in the AI Revolution,” ODI: Think Change, February 10, 2025.
[7] “Strait of Hormuz: As Iran Blocks Key Oil Shipping Route, Can Naval Escorts Help? - Bloomberg,”
[8] “Silicon Valley Giants Invest Billions in Gulf AI Infrastructure,” Jordan Daily.
[9] “Israel and India Expand Defense Ties with $10 Billion Deal | The Jerusalem Post,” The Jerusalem Post |, “How India Replaced Europe as Israel’s Reliable Arms Supplier,” Palestine Chronicle, December 28, 2025.
