The story of AI being told in corporate boardrooms is not the same story being told in communities. Dhar argues that the scale of investment flowing into AI must be matched by an equal commitment to who that technology actually serves. In his view, tech development that does not move in service to humanity is not progress.
This conversation examines what Dhar sees as the central unfinished business of the AI moment. Corporate productivity metrics tell one story. Communities shaped by AI-driven decisions tell another. He argues philanthropy cannot stand on the sidelines while those two stories drift further apart.
Vilas Dhar is President and Trustee of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. The Foundation works at the intersection of AI, data, and public purpose, with a founding conviction that technology must be built to expand human potential and advance equity for the people most affected by its design.
Let's start I wanna go back to my personal experience. It was, like, two thousand nine. They were just saying covering folks like Sam Altman, little company at the time looped before he before he started OpenAI. Companies like Airbnb, Uber, we saw this incredible moment of, like, the democratization of information and giving everyone a voice. Fast forward all these years later, there were good, there was bad, but there was extraordinary human impact. And now, Velas, we're sitting here witnessing one of the most extraordinary tech accelerations of our time. How does this moment compare to tech cycles of the past? What a question. I love it. Laurie, first of all, for for being here with me and thanks to the Commonfund folks for bringing us. Look, wanna answer your question. I'll do it through two experiences just over the last seven days that have really stayed with me. The first was what you might expect. I sat with a very recognizable CEO of a Fortune fifty company. We were in Munich at the security conference and he pulls me aside and he says, we've just spent four hundred million dollars on AI enablement inside of our company and we haven't been able to find a single bit of productivity gain. What's going on? That's one line. Wow. Not said on MSNBC, not said in public, but this is the question that they're asking. Okay. Put that to the side for a second. I'll tell you the second one. I was just in India for the AI global summit that prime minister Modi brought together and I sat for hours of incredible conversations with local civil society organizations and this twenty three year old woman came and showed me this AI driven app that we've created that lets her go into a last mile village, go to a young woman who's having her first child and this twenty three year old with no formal medical training can now diagnose, triage and provide meaningful life saving advice to a woman about as far away from the tech world as you can imagine. It was a two dollar app and maybe creating the whole thing cost twenty five thousand dollars that now has the potential to reshape the lives of tens of millions of people. These are the two stories of the greatest period of tech acceleration we've ever experienced. On one side, this massive investment searching after I'm not quite sure what we often talk about an AI arms race or AGI or something else and on the other real people who are building real amazing tools that maybe go back to that promise you started with your question of democratizing information of making sure people can build things that make the world a better place. It's the reality of the moment is we've got two very different stories out there and a lot of headlines on the first and not so many on the second. On one side what you described, I've seen three major cycles in tech pretty much from start to finish. Right? The rise of the internet which totally transformed the world in many ways. The rise of social media which probably also transformed the world not in many ways that I particularly like or care for. And now this third moment, this rise of AI. On one side there are so many stories of promise and yet we also forget all the lessons that we seem to have ignored the first and the second time through. What happens when you unleash a technology without putting any social guardrails around it? What happens when you let people have access to tooling without asking them questions about how they're gonna use it in moral and ethical ways? What happens when you release these tools first to the first world to the developed economies and then tell everybody else they'll catch up eventually. We have a set of choices to make right now that feel more important than ever and yet we're spending almost no time talking about them. We have this massive diversion of these resources to these companies that are chasing that kind of almost boogeyman goal of AGI. And we got the rest of the world trying to solve real problems but don't have access to the basic building blocks. How do we fix that? In many ways that's a classic market failure. Right? We have the hyper concentration of resources around things that are actually fundamentally maybe not particularly productive for our economy. This is where we have to have a different approach and I think in many ways again for the civil society and public institutions that are in the room, the moment of real agency which is how do you bring a meaningful aggregation of capital to say we're gonna build an alternate way forward. We're seeing this happen. Last year in Paris, I announced with President Macron and a number of others a two and a half billion dollar facility that's funded by philanthropies, by governments, by institutions around the world to build AI capacity outside of the private sector. This means building public compute resources, building data sets, training people and giving them ways to work that have economic dignity, that have wages equal to the private sector but to work on public sector problems. And I have to tell you, it's, you know, it's easy to say there's a lot of bad stories but to me that's a real story of hope. What are you hearing from from them about, you know, what's working and what's not? And specifically, could you give us some examples of where you've seen this actually actually work out? When you go into the closed rooms, you hear the same messages but with a significantly higher level of edge. Landslides and mudslides are a really local phenomenon. Often you get a climate change that leads to a lot of rainfall, obviously it destabilizes some local kind of dirt and hills and villages often have only like fifteen to twenty five minutes of warning before their entire village is surrounded by mud. Okay. This is a problem that is endemic across the developing world. We don't have an answer to it until now. We worked with a team who said, Wait, we can solve this pretty easily. They used a set of very low cost sensors. These are things that cost five to seven dollars. They embedded them around these villages in kind of almost semi random ways. They built an AI model that takes those sensor readings and tracks it to a model they built that allows them to predict mudslides and they put a giant bell in the middle of the village. I'm trying to show you how almost untechnical the implementation is as long as you have the smarts and the AI in the back end. And now essentially we have about an hour's worth of warning whenever the local geographic and weather conditions mean there's a super high risk of landslides, you can deploy the entire system for a few hundred dollars and it's like wildfire, excuse the mental image, spreading across communities in the Philippines and India and Malaysia where every community feels this new sense of safety and security because of an AI enabled tool that cost them almost nothing to deploy. Okay. The single most important ethical issue we must think about when it comes to the future of AI and humans is? What kind of lightning round is this? I thought you were gonna be like, what's your favorite candy? The single most important ethical issue, I think to me is we spend a lot of time saying we have to build ethical technology. I actually have no idea what that is. Ethics is a human function. We have to build an ethical society that's enabled by technology. Who's gonna do that? Where's it gonna happen? That's the work we have to do. Okay. What's your favorite candy? Oh, Snickers bars. Great. But last one, one of your favorite books is by Bell Hooks who wrote all about love. What do love and AI have to do with one another? Love is the act of caring for each other. In AI, so much of what we do is focused on building technology and not on thinking about how we serve each other. I think if could bring those two ideas together, we'd have a very different conception of what technology can mean for the hope and aspiration of humanity. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much. I'm gonna let other folks yeah. Yeah, we can clap.
