Author: Mamata Chitnis Sen

This is the story of people we barely know exist: they are the world’s uncontacted Indigenous groups. A stark warning, issued by Survival International, an NGO: these little-known and little-understood people may vanish within a decade. In its first global inventory of uncontacted people, possibly the most accurate count yet, identifies at least 196 groups in 10 countries across South America, Asia and the Pacific, including India. The report, Uncontacted Indigenous Peoples at the Edge of Survival, is unequivocal: more than 96 per cent of these groups face life-threatening danger from extractive industries. What is unfolding is not a natural…

Can Machines Learn Not Just to Think, But to Care? For decades, the language of artificial intelligence has been one of command and control. Engineers spoke of “alignment”, “guardrails”, and “containment”, imagining machines as subordinates that needed restraint. Geoffrey Hinton—the Nobel Prize-winning scientist often hailed as the “godfather of AI”—has disrupted that paradigm with a startlingly different proposal. Speaking in Las Vegas, Hinton suggested humanity might not survive superintelligence by dominating it, but by raising it. His provocative phrase was “maternal instincts”: programming machines to act less like tools and more like protective parents, offering the kind of compassion and…