Vilas Dhar on Transforming Power through AI

In his position as President of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Vilas Dhar works with policy leaders, civil society organizations, and technologists to create new regulatory and community-level infrastructure for a human-centered AI future.

Vilas’ Bellagio Reflections: “My work became so much more prosperous and fruitful thanks to the community at Bellagio. What had been my individual pursuit became one part of a global movement for a more just, AI-enabled future that involves people across the planet.

“I realized, as we talked, that we need to consider the full breadth of human experiences and perspectives – of corporate AI researchers, policymakers, rights-based practitioners, and even whole communities. Those conversations helped me see that this moment requires broad representation and leadership from diverse global viewpoints, and that realization became the core of my work post-Bellagio.”

Here, Vilas asks how we can prevent AI from cementing current global inequities, and explores how AI will transform power in a society whose civic institutions were built for a pre-AI world.

I’ve spent most of my life in a place of tension between two foundational ideas. The first is that technology can make the world a better place; it can inspire economic opportunity, build new centers of power, let people harness their creativity and find connection, and spread compassion and joy. The second is that, despite this potential, we still live in a world where almost 3 billion people are offline, and many lack access to the benefits of connected technologies.

By 2019, when I came to Bellagio, I’d seen the beginnings of a major transformation of systemic values through AI and data science. Since then, there has been a monumental – and ongoing – transformation of power too. Historically, power belonged to those who held capital – controlling capital meant controlling technology – but now we can democratize not just access to, but also ownership of, these new technologies. And by “ownership,” I mean allowing people everywhere – from my grandfather’s village in India to the rural Illinois town where I grew up – to not only develop and use these technologies, but also influence how they’re governed.

I asked myself: What can a civil society institution or nonprofit do to leverage this moment in which technology is transforming both power and vulnerability? What can we do to build a more equitable, community-led future? While we work towards that goal at the foundation, our broader work is the pursuit of human dignity and community empowerment through technological and societal transformation.

There were two things that I sought from my Bellagio experience. I wanted to tackle this question of whether tech-driven societal transformation was happening. If so, how we could shape it in line with our shared human values? I believed it was a critical moment for humanity with regards to AI, and my cohort helped me develop confidence in my hypothesis, which I was able to validate and extend. I was then able to define specific, desired goals. The first is that we can’t only involve tech-focused foundations; we have to include the civil society organizations working on the front lines that need to understand how AI will transform their fields. This has guided how my foundation allocates capital and builds partnerships. The second is that money alone can’t solve the problem; we need to build more capacity to support the use of data and AI in the civil sector. In part, as AI literacy becomes a defining skill for the future, that means challenging a status quo that accepts the digital divide as inevitable. We’ve built a team of data scientists and AI professionals who work directly with nonprofits and the communities they support.