By Srinath Sridharan
Across human history, every great technological wave has redrawn the boundaries of human possibility and anxiety. Fire extended survival but demanded restraint. The wheel accelerated mobility but began the politics of territory. The printing press multiplied knowledge but weakened those who once controlled it. The industrial revolution mechanised production and created wealth at scale but also displaced craft, labour, and meaning.
Each breakthrough forced humanity to invent new forms of governance, morality, and identity. With every shift, the human mind itself has changed—its capacity for attention, reflection, and restraint steadily eroded by the very tools meant to empower it.
Today’s digital and cognitive technologies multiply that pattern. Artificial intelligence (AI), neuro-interfaces, immersive media, and algorithmic platforms reach inward, altering memory, attention, judgement, and empathy. They influence the very faculties through which culture interprets reality. For the first time in human history, technology is not just reorganising human activity, but also reprogramming the human condition.
In less than a decade, India has become one of the fastest adopters of digital technologies in history. Over a billion people are connected through mobile devices. Hundreds of millions use digital payment systems daily. AI is already in our classrooms, workplaces, and governance. We celebrate this, as it signals ambition and scale. Yet beneath the euphoria lies a quieter concern: technology is evolving faster than our social instincts, ethical norms, and institutional capacities.
This “cultural lag” is not unique to India, but in a society as plural, stratified, and layered as ours, its consequences cut deeper. Every new technology reshapes relationships, redistributes power, and redefines trust. The pace of change today is unlike any earlier era. Industrial revolutions took decades to settle; digital revolutions unfold in months. Policy systems, education frameworks, and even family norms are struggling to interpret this speed.
The effects are visible everywhere. Algorithms influence who gets hired, who receives attention, and whose voice is amplified online. Automation reshapes employment faster than skilling programmes can respond. Information systems shape public opinion before regulators can react. Citizens are connected through networks they do not fully understand, governed by codes they did not write. Public discourse celebrates convenience and scale, but rarely pauses to ask whether fairness and accountability can keep up with such velocity.
Culture, in its broadest sense, is the software of society. It encodes the invisible rules that govern how we treat one another, how we interpret power, and how we manage difference. In India, culture has long functioned as the unspoken architecture that holds a civilisation of many languages, faiths, and histories together.
It teaches us how to coexist amid disagreement, how to show respect even in hierarchy, how to value restraint over aggression. Culture defines fairness long before laws do and sustains trust when institutions are slow or absent. When that software weakens, every system built upon it—political, economic, or technological—begins to falter. Technology may connect us faster, but without cultural calibration, it can just as easily corrode the civility, patience, and empathy that have allowed this society to endure its own diversity.
That erosion is already visible. Our styles, preferences, and much of behaviours now mirror the West, by conditioning. For decades, what we have watched, read, admired, and repeated through television, film, literature and now the internet has shaped what we aspire to become. The vocabulary of success, the aesthetics of who we should follow, even the way we measure happiness increasingly follow borrowed templates. In adopting their lifestyles, we have quietly outsourced parts of our own.
Technology and media have not just changed what India consumes — they have begun to change how India imagines itself. The very tools that promise empowerment can hollow out empathy and patience—the moral circuits that keep societies humane. This is not an argument against innovation. It is an argument for responsibility. Every technological revolution needs its cultural counterweight.
Too often, regulation follows crisis globally. For policy leaders, the real dilemma is how to balance the pursuit of innovation with the preservation of social-good, at a time when even the definition of “good” is shifting with each new technology. Beneath that moral tension lies a strategic one—as nations race to dominate emerging technologies that will shape not only their economic future but also global power, geopolitical influence, and financial control.
The excitement around innovation must be matched by investment in ethical design and risk assessment. India needs a standing institutional mechanism to evaluate the social and moral impact of emerging technologies before they scale.
This also demands a shift in how we educate and govern. A future-ready society cannot rely only on engineers and coders. It must cultivate citizens who understand technology’s social consequences.
Globally, the world is beginning to confront this lag between culture and code. The European Union’s AI Act defines “acceptable risk”. The US debates whether AI-generated speech deserves the same freedoms as human speech. China folds technology into ideology. Each approach mirrors its culture. India must frame its own—our civilisational instinct has always leaned toward balance over extremity. That instinct must guide our digital future.
India has always been comfortable with the complexity of plurality. That may be our greatest advantage now. We can design a model others emulate—where technology serves consciousness, where cultural wisdom tempers ambition, and where progress is measured not by speed but by purpose. For those shaping technology policy, the challenge is not to control innovation, but to ensure it strengthens the moral and civic foundations that hold India together. The challenge now is to civilise innovation.
Srinath Sridharan is a policy researcher and corporate advisor
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