When the market learns to think: How AI is rewriting India’s economic consciousness

Recently, while ordering dinner from the same neighbourhood restaurant I have trusted for years, I noticed something unsettling. The price of my usual dish had risen by nearly twelve rupees. There had been no shortage of ingredients, no sudden rise in wholesale costs, no inflationary jolt worth mentioning. The reason lay elsewhere. At exactly 7:42 pm, an algorithm had calculated that demand in my pin code was likely to rise. When I mentioned this to the restaurant owner the next day, he smiled faintly.

 “It’s not my rate,” he said. “The system decides now.”Later that evening, my taxi home cost almost double what I had paid that morning. The weather was calm. Traffic flowed smoothly. Nothing in the physical city had changed. Only its invisible logic had. This is not a story about rising prices. It is a story about the architecture of decision-making itself — about who decides, how they decide, and what happens when that authority quietly migrates away from human hands. Across the world, and increasingly in India, the market is undergoing a transformation far deeper than digitisation or liberalisation. It is no longer merely responding to human behaviour. It is anticipating it, classifying it, scoring it — and acting upon it before the individual even realises they are being evaluated.

The market, without fanfare or public debate, has begun to think. This isn’t just automation. It is the relocation of economic power. Decisions that once involved negotiation, discretion, and visibly human judgment are now routed through machine logic — probabilistic systems that almost never explain how they reached their conclusions. We see the outcome. We do not see the reasoning. Participation remains visible. Authority does not.

A loan application is rejected without explanation. A job applicant is filtered out by software they never meet. A gig worker’s daily income rises and falls according to surge coefficients they cannot see or challenge. Efficiency has deepened. Understanding has thinned. This is the point where an economic shift becomes a political one.

India continues to speak of artificial intelligence as if it were merely another industry — an extension of the IT services era. That framing is dangerously outdated. AI today functions less like a sector and more like infrastructural intelligence. It shapes logistics, credit allocation, crop insurance, welfare targeting, recruitment, consumer pricing, healthcare triage, even political messaging. It does not sit at the edges of the economy. It scripts the rules by which the economy now operates. And with that comes a new grammar of power. The real advantage in this new landscape is not just capital or scale. It is prediction. The firm that anticipates demand outperforms the one that simply responds to it. The platform that infers intent before it is articulated begins to shape behaviour before a choice feels conscious. Value is no longer created merely at the moment of purchase. It is created at the moment a future action is correctly forecast. Prediction, once a managerial tool, has become a governing mechanism. Insurance companies recalibrate premiums using climate risk models. Fintech platforms assign “trust scores” based on behavioural traces.

Retailers adjust prices minute by minute through real-time demand forecasts. Agricultural applications advise farmers through satellite-assisted probability models that suggest when to sow or sell. These systems do more than optimise. They stratify. They decide which lives are considered worthy of risk and which are economically inconvenient. When such decisions are opaque, power becomes unaccountable. When the logic shaping outcomes cannot be questioned, society begins to resemble a managed system rather than a participatory economy. Speed without comprehension does not empower. It destabilised.

AI’s most significant impact is not the sudden disappearance of jobs. It is subtler and more corrosive. Certain skills simply fade from visibility. If a form of human judgment cannot be easily measured, captured, or ranked by an algorithm, it slowly loses institutional value. The economy does not collapse. It quietly reorganises itself around what machines recognise as meaningful. Experience becomes noise. Wisdom becomes anecdotal. Human intuition is tolerated but no longer trusted.

Nowhere is this more perilous than within India’s informal workforce — its drivers, vendors, migrant labourers, small traders, and rural entrepreneurs. They are increasingly governed by platforms they neither design nor understand, dependent on scoring systems and digital metrics that determine their income and visibility. Without deliberate policy intervention, AI will not reduce inequality. It will automate its reproduction. India’s digital confidence masks a deeper vulnerability. The most critical components of advanced AI — high-performance chips, core models, cloud infrastructure, and foundational algorithms — remain concentrated in the hands of a few foreign corporations and governments. This is not merely technological dependence. It is strategic fragility. When credit systems, supply chains, and financial flows rely on external compute power, national autonomy becomes conditional. The threat does not appear dramatic. It arrives through convenience. In the modern world, sovereignty is no longer defined only by land or borders. It is computational. Whoever controls the logic that shapes economic behaviour exercises a form of power that is both invisible and immense. Intelligence itself has become a strategic asset.

Algorithms do not possess ethics. They do not distinguish between what is fair and what is merely efficient. They optimise according to the data they are fed. And because historical data often carries historical prejudice, they frequently reproduce old inequalities with mathematical precision — not because they intend to discriminate, but because repetition is coded into their learning. Inequality spreads not through ideology, but through iteration. The real danger is not rogue machines. It is perfectly obedient ones — systems that execute flawed instructions with flawless consistency. Efficiency, when detached from ethical oversight, does not resolve injustice. It deepens it beneath a veneer of objectivity.

This technological shift is routinely packaged as progress: faster services, seamless platforms, instant decisions. Beneath that promise lies a choice India is already making, even if it prefers not to articulate it. Will we allow imported intelligence to dictate the contours of our social and economic life? Or will we insist on shaping systems built within our own democratic and cultural framework?

Will citizens become data points to be finely optimised, or participants in deciding how these systems govern them? This is not a call to reject technology. It is a call to design it consciously. That means building transparent systems, insisting on explainability, regulating algorithmic decision-making, strengthening domestic computing capacity, and creating mechanisms through which citizens can challenge automated outcomes. It means treating AI not as a private convenience but as public infrastructure — one that must be governed with clarity and care. Technology will inevitably transform India’s economy. The question is not whether it will happen, but how it will be shaped and who will benefit. A society that cannot interrogate the systems shaping its outcomes slowly forgets what participation feels like. India’s AI future will not be judged solely by GDP growth or technological speed. It will be judged by whether people still recognise themselves in the decisions that shape their lives. By whether power remains visible or hides inside unreadable code. By whether efficiency serves dignity or replaces it. The market may now be learning to think. But thinking is not wisdom. Wisdom requires context, memory, empathy, and consequence — qualities that no machine acquires on its own.

A thinking market may be inevitable. A humane one is not. It is a matter of design, of regulation, of civic will. And for now, that responsibility still rests with us — in how consciously we choose to live alongside the intelligence we are building.

Author is a theoretical physicist at the University of North Carolina, United States; views are personal