Ram Sarasia

Observer of the human story | Humanist | Optimist | Sometime entrepreneur | Investor | Proud To be British, Indian & Kenyan |

[Ram Sarasia @RamSarasia]

@ZZoariah Very insightful as always. I think someone in the BJP hierarchy needs to start challenging the narrative that’s being presented by the CJP … the BJP have transformed India beyond recognition and they should proudly defend their record.

[Shycollie @shycollie]

@MarcoFoster_ @ZohranKMamdani Socialism always sounds beautiful, the government will give you everything you need to live a “dignified” life. But the government doesn’t actually have anything to give you, it’s all from your fellow taxpayers

[Ram Sarasia @RamSarasia]

@ZZoariah The problem is that the preachers and so called scholars frame any challenge to their narrative as being an attack on Islam itself.

[Ram Sarasia @RamSarasia]

@ZZoariah Spot on in your analysis for how some Muslims become radicalised. Thank God that in India 🇮🇳, we don’t have these problems on the scale that we see in other countries, compared to the size of our populations.

[Ram Sarasia @RamSarasia]

@kiranshaw @iitmadras That’s called Big Thinking and why not? We have some of best minds and talent on the planet and all they require is just the opportunity.

[Ram Sarasia @RamSarasia]

@NBDwrites That sentiment doesn't resonate with anyone in my immediate circle. On the contrary, we experience an overwhelming sense of validation from India's progress, recognizing how deeply our own standing is enhanced by the country's rising global influence.

[Ram Sarasia @RamSarasia]

@ZZoariah He’s a clown ��� isn’t he… playing to the home audience.

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

The loudest voices stoking fears about AI dangers have made tremendous headway in the past two weeks. AI technology has not taken some unexpected, dangerous turn, but the hype around it — propelled by what appears to be a well orchestrated PR campaign — has drummed up considerable fear. I worry that it represents a setback for our field.

I have written frequently that fears of AI are overhyped. AI’s capabilities can be uncannily human-like and unpredictable, and it’s rational to worry when people who are directly involved express concerns. But I see the problems as a sign of the engineering work that ahead, rather than insurmountable barriers or the sky falling. AI technology continues to advance — which is a good thing! — but technical advances, poorly understood by the public, give those who seek to generate hype repeated opportunities to do so.

First, I don’t see any step up in the risk of human extinction from AI compared to a few months ago. The theories about this remain the same fantastical, science fiction scenarios as a few months ago. The biggest change in AI risk is its cybersecurity capabilities — a topic which we should take seriously — but this, too, will not lead to the end of the world.

The most notable recent event leading to increased fear was when an OpenAI team deployed an agent swarm that hacked into Hugging Face. Much of the popular press contained significant hype. For example, some publications reported that a swarm of 1,200 agents carried out the attack. While this was technically accurate, as I write this, I have about 1,300 processes running on my laptop. Yes, the ability to get large swarms of agents to work in parallel on a task is a significant technical advance, And, in computing, many processes run at the same time. So this shouldn’t be seen as some magical capability.

Additionally, OpenAI’s buggy sandboxing and monitoring processes were key to enabling this incident. Fixing these bugs and putting in place improved monitoring would be appropriate fixes, not pausing AI. There are many well known ways to attack software systems. The main advantage of AI agents is that they are relentless. They will tirelessly try many tactics — and have the patience to chain vulnerabilities together — that previously would have taken an infeasible amount of human effort. But in the long term, I believe the advantage will lie with defenders (because they have more information with which to identify bugs, which they can fix), but the cyber-threat landscape has changed significantly. There are still bottlenecks to identifying and exploiting a vulnerability. AI agents still have to try a lot of things to see what works, and taking these actions takes time and might be detected by defenders. This is why, even though it is now easy to obtain versions of leading open weight models that have had their guardrails removed or weakened, so they will not refuse to try to execute cyber attacks, the world has not ended.

I am also concerned about the anthropomorphization of AI in a lot of reporting, where LLMs and agents are unnecessarily treated as if they were people. If I wield a hammer, miss a nail, and accidentally dent the wall, it’s not the fault of the hammer. The problem lies in how I used the hammer. Similarly, if I prompt an agent and it hacks into someone else’s system, the responsibility lies with me, not the agent.

Of course, we want to build systems that are as safe and predictable as possible. (For example, an unsafe hammer would be one whose head randomly flies off under normal use.) Today’s agentic systems are not predictable, but I see no reason why, by applying sound engineering practices, we won’t be able to make them extremely safe to use. One new element in the forecasts of AI-enabled doom is AI companies disclaiming responsibility for their own products. “I didn’t do it; my out-of-control agent did!” There’s a balance to be struck between the responsibility of the tool maker and the tool user, but when something goes wrong, let’s hold the people building and/or using the hammer responsible, rather than the hammer. (By the way, if you’re worried about AI bioweapon risk, David Bellamy has a great post on why this, too, is overhyped. Briefly, the bottleneck in building a bioweapon is not intelligence, but lab work and manufacturing.)

Pausing AI progress will create much more harm than benefit. First, our adversaries will certainly not slow down. Second, engineering requires discovering problems empirically so we can fix them. If we pause AI by a decade, we will also delay finding and implementing safety engineering fixes by about the same duration.

Of course, the incentive to stoke fears — for regulatory capture, to garner attention, or to make one’s technology seem more powerful — remains the same as before. Disclaiming responsibility is a new one. Taking a hard technical look at the actual risks however, I see little factual basis for the degree of fear that’s been stoked up. We still have hard research and engineering work ahead to improve AI safety, but the beneficial applications continue to vastly outweigh the risks, and we should keep building.

[Original text (with links): https://t.co/jni2tWazAH ]

[Ram Sarasia @RamSarasia]

@k_bhairav @jcrabtree M

[Ram Sarasia @RamSarasia]

@DanDan635x @KemiBadenoch What about Shale gas ?

[Ram Sarasia @RamSarasia]

@nehaGurung1692 Hey you shouldn’t apologise even if you’d bought it. You’ve worked hard and you need to reward yourself to keep up the motivation…. You’re bringing the northeast into the mainstream of Indian society…

[Ram Sarasia @RamSarasia]

@ZZoariah Both nations are focused on building real economic value, technology transfer, and infrastructure to uplift their citizens' everyday lives. Meanwhile, bad actors who bring nothing of value to their own people continue to choose destruction and conflict instead of progress.

[British Indians Voice 🇮🇳🇬🇧 @BritIndianVoice]

Indians in the UK, by the numbers that rarely make headlines. 🇮🇳🇬🇧

2 million+ people.

2.9% of the population.

The single largest visible ethnic minority in Britain.

74% homeownership — the highest of any group, including White British (68%).

76% employment rate — the highest of any ethnic group.

Lowest crime rate of any community in England and Wales.

2nd highest GCSE attainment of any ethnic group — behind only Chinese pupils.

1 in 6 NHS professionals.

25% of all UK medicines, imported from India.

1,912 Indian-owned companies, £105.77 billion combined turnover, employing 200,000+ British workers.

£47.4 billion in bilateral trade, now growing under CETA.

One Prime Minister.

One Foreign Office minister raised in Bihar.

29 MPs.

None of this happened by accident.

It happened because a community that arrived with almost nothing decided,
quietly, that “enough” was never actually enough. 🙏

#BritishIndians

[Ram Sarasia @RamSarasia]

High praise for the Indian Healthcare system from the NHS chairman for England Dr Penny Dash. Well worth a read.

NHS boss: Britain should learn from India’s world-class healthcare system https://t.co/g2Uf8x5aWQ

[Ram Sarasia @RamSarasia]

@ZZoariah As a 3rd-gen NRI attending an Independence Day event in London, hearing leaders praise India’s rise made my heart burst with pride. We didn’t bleed for this freedom, but miles away from home, seeing our heritage honored proves patriotism isn't outdated—it’s our strength. 🇮🇳

[Zeba Zoariah @ZZoariah]

I’m from Assam and every year I watch my home become a headline for all the wrong reasons.

People see flooded roads. We see bodies being pulled out of the water. We see families waiting for loved ones who never come back. We see children sleeping in overcrowded relief camps, mothers wondering how they’ll feed their families tomorrow, and elderly people stranded with nowhere to go. This time it is way worse.

Thousands have lost their homes. Entire villages have been swallowed. Crops that took months to grow are gone in a matter of hours. Cattle, dogs, goats, animals tied outside or trapped by rising waters are washed away. For many families, those animals weren’t just livestock, they were their livelihood. So many family members of mine are affected.

And then there are the people who survive. They return home only to find walls collapsed, ancestral belonging swayed away, everything they owned buried under mud, contaminated water, disease, and the heartbreaking task of starting over with nothing. Even after so much, you will still see people having some hope. I urge everyone to keep that hope alive.

Around 80 lives have already been lost, but numbers never tell the whole story. Every death leaves behind a family. Every flooded home is someone’s entire life.

Please don’t let Assam trend for a day and disappear from your thoughts the next. If you’re able to help in any way through donations, verified relief efforts, or even by amplifying what’s happening please do.

For us…this isn’t just another news. It’s home.

[Nick Collins @nickcollins1953]

Mesopotamia was never the cradle of civilisation. India was.

I spent forty years in international shipping, not academia. When I began researching the history of maritime trade, I had no orthodoxy to defend. I followed the evidence, and it kept arriving in the same place: the Indian subcontinent.

Nineteenth century archaeologists dug in Mesopotamia because the climate preserved artefacts, the biblical sources pointed them there, and the Ottomans allowed the excavations. That is the entire basis for the myth of Mesopotamia as "the cradle of civilisation."

Nobody applied the same rigour to India. Mohenjo-daro was not discovered until 1922. By then the narrative had already hardened.

What was actually there was the largest civilisation of the ancient world. Three hundred cities. Fifty thousand people in each, by 2600 BC. Two thirds of them stood on the banks of the Sarasvati, the central and greatest of the seven rivers described in the Rig Veda, flowing down from the Himalayas before the river vanished entirely by 1900 BC. The Vedic kings claimed territory stretching "sea to sea," from Afghanistan to Maharashtra, some 1.5 million square miles, against Egypt's 13,000. A dock at Lothal built to handle thirty ships of sixty tons, unmatched in Europe for four thousand years. When it was first excavated, it was recorded as a bathing pool.

When the scale became impossible to dismiss, the theory was not corrected. It was replaced with a story of pale-skinned nomads from the steppe who supposedly arrived around 1500 BC and brought civilisation with them. There is no evidence. The chronology doesn't work. The Vedas describe no invasion.

In 2019 a Harvard-led genetic study revived the claim, and the press reported it as confirmation. It was not. The same study found the builders of these cities were indigenous. The Sarasvati river that the Rig Veda described had already dried up before these newcomers arrived. What the study also found is that a small group of men, arriving after the Sarasvati had already dried up, interbred with the existing population and left a genetic signature. That is all.

So, where they chose to dig was mostly an accident of climate and access. The Aryan invasion theory was constructed because an Indian civilisation that owed nothing to Caucasians was a fact the late nineteenth century could not accommodate.

Link to full Substack essay with sources in the comments below.

[Ram Sarasia @RamSarasia]

@nikesharora @HarryStebbings Hey you should definitely continue. Been a big fan of yours since Google UK days.

[Ram Sarasia @RamSarasia]

@MelanieLatest Totally agree. A nation cannot survive without a shared cultural foundation and economic realism. Moving away from an unsustainable welfare model and drawing firm red lines to protect our historic values isn't harsh—it's essential for long-term survival.

[Ram Sarasia @RamSarasia]

@kiranshaw @IGFupdates Congratulations on a well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Award, @kiranshaw! Love the mindset — the best is yet to come! 🥂