China’s new AI model DeepSeek R1 has sent shockwaves worldwide. While this AI model matches the capabilities of advanced models made by American companies – such as OpenAI’s o1 – what sets it apart is that it is open-source, free to use, and cost-effective.
It ended the US monopoly in the AI field and China achieved this feat despite American trade restrictions, paving the way for Chinese technological development.
As AI researcher Karen Hao explains, DeepSeek has put forth a great challenge to dominant paradigms in modern AI development. It has disproved that ‘scaling’ – OpenAI and Google’s strategy to build bigger models – is the only way to improve AI models.
This is important because competitions on the scale have led to massive rises in carbon emissions, air pollution, water shortages and distorted electricity grids due to the heavy resource usage of data centers, apart from the expenditures of billions of dollars.
Also read: Why Deepseek’s AI Leap Only Puts China in Front for Now
While DeepSeek is making headlines amid AI’s boom, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has suggested that some change is required to the ‘social contract’. This suggestion warrants our attention because the pursuit of a hypothetical all-knowing AGI — or artificial general intelligence — is often cited to evade accountability and responsibility for any present-day harm caused by AI.
Moreover, the suggestion of changing the social contract must be contextualised within the present political realities of our times — the rise of radicalisation, misinformation and recession in democratic values and the role of Silicon Valley in enabling them.
Understanding social contract and the exclusion of marginalised
The dominant social contract theories were produced in Europe in situ. Not only did these social contract theories have euro-centric biases, but they were also exclusionary as they excluded several marginalised communities from their ambit.
Charles Mills has pointed out the racial nature of classical social contract theories, which often present ‘white supremacy as the unnamed political system.’
Such racial contracts end up in the subjugation of non-white peoples and the establishment of white superiority in political, social, and epistemic arenas. Carol Pateman has highlighted the gendered nature of these social contract theories by highlighting that the social contract constitutes both freedom and domination. It ensures male domination over women’s sexuality as it presents civil freedom as a masculine attribute.
Moreover, these theories valorised compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness. Rawlsian Theory makes the disabled anguished by its erasure of them from its ambit. Mills excluded, Upendra Baxi points out, backward nations, women, and children from the ambit of the right to liberty. These exclusionary social contract theories spread in non-western geographies through colonialism and established themselves as gospel truths through a knowledge mechanism, in which white men were presented as the agents of rationality, autonomy and reasonableness.
New imagination of social contract
Claims to imagine a new social contract thus need to be interrogated from the vantage of the marginalised so that the attempts to renegotiate the social contract do not result in their exclusion.
Should we allow silicon valley czars to rescript social contracts while excluding most of humanity?
Trump’s inaugural speech was an assault on the human dignity and affirmation of LGBTQ+ people as he claimed that he was restoring ‘biological truth’ and ‘common sense.’ Tech billionaires were flanking him during his inauguration. Altman, who once warned the world about Trump, now believes that Trump will lead the US into the age of AI.
Also read: The Secret Sauce Behind China’s Relentless Innovation Drive
Will the AIs produced by these billionaires be affirming of LGBTQ+ identity? What would be the place of non-binary sexual identities in the social contract created by these tech czars?
Elon Musk’s open interference in Germany’s election and his support of the far-right party in Germany tells us that Silicon Valley poses a great threat to democracy worldwide. Meta’s closure of its fact-checking unit shows the valley’s non-commitment toward truth.
In India, Ola’s CEO Bhavish Aggarwal suggested that his AI model Krutim will give an Indian version of history. This version of history fixates itself with the idea of a nation-state and claims that India was a country before the British Raj. Such fixation valorises the European model of nationalism unwittingly and suppresses alternative views on sovereignty and nationhood. AI is thus largely beholden to state interests.
The online version of DeepSeek is hosted in China, hence it is subject to censorship on Chinese political issues to abide by local regulations. However, the open-source version is freely modifiable in any way. Truth is becoming a casualty in this euphoria around AI.
AI, geography of prejudice and questions of periphery
What could it mean for people at the periphery who are the targets of prejudice masquerading as ‘common sense’? It needs an epistemic interrogation. Gyanendra Pandey highlights that difference is often posited as a means of ‘otherisation’.
That ‘different other’ is pushed to the margins. In this formation of ‘norm’, Pandey argues, “Men are not described as different; it is women who are”. Foreign colonisers are not different; the colonised are.”
Caste Hindus are not different in India — it is Muslims, tribals, and Dalits who are. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant heterosexual males are not different in the United States; at one time or another, everybody else is.’ Our concern is that in the era when prejudice is presented as common sense and when tech billionaires are enabling it, any attempt to propose a new social contract will be an exercise of prejudice.
If Trump’s US is the ‘field of origin’ for AI and its social contract, it will indeed bear an imprint of racialisation because dominant discourse on AI and its production is happening in the geographies of prejudice. Similarly, DeepSeek will remain ambivalent on troubling questions about China. In India, as long as caste continues as the social reality of internal colonialism, an indigenous AI will bear the imprint of caste Hindu biases.
To militate against this, we may need broader solidarity among the people at the peripheries.
AI is here to stay. Sam Altman’s suggestion to change the social contract is not innocuous. It requires global civil society to be vigilant against any scripting of a new social contract that enables recession in civil liberties, metastasise of unfreedoms, and subjugation of marginalized communities and geographies.
Tech bros should not be allowed to abridge our freedom. They cannot be allowed to write a new social contract, excluding most of humanity.
Vijay K. Tiwari is an assistant professor (law) at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata.
Kaif Siddiqui is a doctoral scholar at the NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad.
