Chapter 06 · Section II · 14 min read
Societal implications of AI
Work, fairness, language, and sovereignty — the four questions Nepal will have to answer in the next decade.
The interesting questions about AI are not technical. They are about who benefits, who is harmed, and who decides.
Work. A model that drafts legal contracts changes what a junior lawyer in Kathmandu spends their day doing. A model that grades school essays changes what teachers teach.
Fairness. A model trained on data from one community will be subtly worse for another. In Nepal, where caste, ethnicity, and language all carry historical disadvantage, this can amplify existing harm in ways that are invisible from the outside.
Language. A government that adopts an English-only AI policy is, in effect, conducting policy in English. The choice of language is a policy choice.
Sovereignty. A health diagnosis system run on servers in Singapore is not really under Nepali control. Where the model runs, who maintains it, and who can audit it, matter as much as what it does.
This section is a stub. The full version will work through one case study for each.