Whatever creativity/thinking/effort bandwidth that's available will now get shifted to a different place in the problem-solving effort bottleneck.

That's the hallmark of any delegation being effective. Do we see that happening with AI tools? Personally, I do see that working for me. Is it as good as the hype makes it to be or I wish it to be? maybe not, yet, for me. But that's the case with most things in life.

Money serves its purpose while it's in motion. Increasing the velocity of money is good for economy. All the payment rails above do that 24/7/365 with lowest friction – by making all modes of payment possible and for free.

Digital payment rails is an order of magnitude cheaper (all inclusive) compared to cash rails. Accepting notes, counting, and depositing them, doing book-keeping and reconciling it against sales receipts, paying workers and vendors, avoiding leakage and theft etc – all cost time and money. For small merchants, it costs them time away from their business to handle cash.

UPI person-to-merchant (p2m) payments puts money instantly in their bank account. Their bank statements showing P2M deposits help them borrow for working capital at better interest rates.

Risk of theft with cash is much higher than digital theft from their bank accounts. RBI mandated 2FA, velocity checks, cooling-off periods, and awareness campaigns etc help people avoid scams.

W.r.t taxes, GST surveillance does catch merchants who accept high volume of P2M payments but aren't filing GST returns. Conversely, filing GST returns again helps with credit ratings and borrowing on better terms for working capital.

They put out a lot of useful stats here https://www.rbi.org.in/Scripts/Statistics.aspx

Daily payment settlement stats here: https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/content/docs/PSDDP04062020....

I worked on scaling UPI a few years ago. Real-time Payments is vastly more complex as it is much more distributed - each transaction involves the two banks holding funds, two end-user apps (and their banks), and the network (npci) – for the payment to complete end to end, multiple message exchanges need to happen between these parties while the user at both ends are waiting. So, if you measure the scale in messages/sec it would 10-25x higher.

Real-time payment rails that works 24/7 365 days a year from any bank to any bank (domestic, no exceptions) for free is truly a game-changer. Compare that to US payment rails which is slow and expensive. Apart from UPI, India has 3 more payment rails – NEFT (similar to ACH – batch settlement), IMPS (similar to UPI, instantaneous - but different user experience), RTGS (real-time, intermediated by the central bank RBI, but only for high-value transactions) – all are 24/7/365 and free. Then, there's credit card rails – apart from Visa and Mastercard, India also has RuPay which has much lower interchange rate.

So it is less about whether people will be “allowed” to own AI, and more about whether there will be anything useful to own in the first place.

The incentive for local models is mostly to make them good orchestrators or user agents. They may give you some privacy and control, but they will still depend on much larger models running in datacenters for anything difficult.

I remember all the excitement around OpenMoko and other open-source “BlackBerry killer” projects. BlackBerry did get killed, but not by any of those individual-first projects.

For AI regulation, I think we should focus on normal commercial rules: consumer protection, privacy, antitrust, liability, and so on. In other words, focus on where money changes hands and where companies have power over users.

Military and offensive use is different. There, regulation is not much of a defense. The real defense is having enough capability and strength of your own.

Restricting AI because it can give dangerous knowledge to ordinary people is like restricting the printing press because it can be used to spread radical ideas.

The way mobile radio/phone networks have evolved (trusted walled garden with backward compatibility) vs Internet has evolved (untrusted with end to end security) is in stark contrast to each other.

Irritating thing is how Apple hides bluetooth headphones pairing 2-3 clicks deeper than AirPods pairing – on iPhones and Apple TV.

If you let your legal team use such broad CYA language, it is usually because you are not sure what's going on and want CYA, or you actually want to keep the door open for broader use with those broader permissive legal terms. On the other hand, if you are sure that you will preserve user's privacy as you are stating in marketing materials, then you should put it in legal writing explicitly.