Pedro Sánchez landed in New Delhi this Wednesday with a delegation with two ministers, Óscar López (Digital Transformation) and Luis Planas (Agriculture) and a group of businessmen specialized in The president’s trip, his third to India in three years, has two clear objectives. First, participate in the artificial intelligence summit in the Indian capital. There he plans to demand a more regulated, more “human” artificial intelligence, at the service of people, and not uncontrolled and as a simple matter without any control from the states, and therefore with an obvious risk that it will have very negative consequences for millions of people and jobs.
And on the other hand, Sánchez has met the Indian prime minister, and he has increasingly authoritarian overtones – the entire city is invaded by hundreds of large photographs with his face, something very rare in democracies. Its intention is to seek large investments from the Asian giant in Spain or open the market of this colossus, which has 1.4 billion inhabitants, to Spanish companies.
Sánchez is consolidating a close relationship with Modi, who last year, with a ride by the two leaders and their wives through the streets in open cars that was criticized in some quarters in Spain for its bombastic style.
The meeting between the two leaders, according to Spanish Government sources, “has served to confirm the good state of relations between Spain and India.” “The two have shared the need to continue taking steps towards an AI that puts people at the center. The two have congratulated each other on the opportunity represented by the recent EU-India trade agreement,” they point out. Sánchez told Modi that this agreement “in a context like the current one is a great message that we send to our societies” and that “India plays an essential role for stability in the region and in the world.”
Modi, an ultranationalist who boasts of having placed India as a world power with leading companies and even though it still has a dramatic problem of poverty and inequality, has opened the doors to Spain for important military contracts. In addition, other major infrastructure projects are being forged, one of the specialties of Spanish multinationals, and also for the entry of Spanish agricultural products such as olive oil and wine, the main reason for Minister Planas’ trip.
Sánchez and López are especially interested in showing at this summit a group of Spanish companies specialized in AI with promising results that would show the country as a candidate to also be on the front line in the race for the development of the new technology.
But the president and his minister are also focused on the regulatory issues of artificial intelligence, in which the European Union is a pioneer and which Spain wants to promote even more clearly. In New Delhi, where his Brazilian ally Lula and the Frenchman Emmanuel Macron are also scheduled to attend, Sánchez will defend a clear regulation of AI so that advances are put at the service of the improvement of humanity and not of a few millionaires who develop it with a handful of companies.
The president arrives in India just after the Council of Ministers has urged the Prosecutor’s Office to act against the platforms that allow, precisely thanks to artificial intelligence, deep fakes of nudity affect minors on a massive scale. It is an investigation that has already begun in France. especially against X, owned by Elon Musk, and now the Government wants to extend it to Spain. López’s ministry also already has the age verification system ready that would prevent minors from accessing pornographic content, for example, or control that they do not access networks until they are 16 years old, as Australia has already done and other countries are considering.
Sánchez will also speak about this matter in New Delhi, although in La Moncloa they point out that they are different things, and the control of artificial intelligence to make it more “human”, this is designed for the service of people, is something broader than its fraudulent use on social networks to destroy the image of minors.
Sánchez and his team believe that it is compatible to bet on this technology, try to place Spain in the leading group of this race and at the same time bet on regulation to avoid a lack of control that ends with artificial intelligence that ends up harming millions of people, increasing inequality and benefiting only a few.
