India, May 5 -- As global AI models drain USD 150 billion through 'predictive arbitrage,' India's path to a USD 30 trillion economy lies in weaponising its chaos against a new age of algorithmic colonisation

In his 1998 masterpiece, Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott argues that the first act of any great power is to make its people "legible." For the early modern state, this meant inventing surnames, standardising weights and measures, and drawing maps. By making the messy, chaotic reality of human life readable on a flat sheet of paper, the state could finally tax, conscript, and control. Legibility, Scott noted, is the precondition for manipulation.

Three hundred years ago, the East India Company didn't just conquer India with muske...