Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Chor Pharn, and he’s easily one of the most thoughtful writers on Substack right now. He has this very distinctive, staccato style, but underneath that is a phenomenally clear way of thinking.
One of his recent essays is about India in the age of AI, and as an Indian I couldn’t not read it. He starts by pointing out that India’s rise as a major economy is unusual. We didn’t really follow the neat textbook path of agriculture → industry → manufacturing → services. Instead, we more or less skipped the manufacturing stage and built a services-led economy. India became the cognitive back-end of the global system.
If companies around the world had process-heavy, routine, or support work they wanted done cheaply and at scale, India became the obvious place to send it. IT services became our biggest export. Global firms set up massive GCCs and back offices here. For a long time, this worked. Human cognition was the bottleneck, and India had a huge pool of relatively cheap, English-speaking talent. You can’t autoscale human brains like an AWS server, but India was the closest thing the world had to autoscaling cognition.
That’s the model Chor Pharn argues is now under threat. The work India has been exporting—testing, documentation, triage, support, routine analysis—is exactly the kind of cognitive labour AI systems can now do near compute, not near people. As he puts it, “AI systems collapsed the cost of cognition. Inference began to replace interpretation. AI does not speed up human workflows; it bypasses them.”
So the question becomes: if companies can now spin up AI agents to do the kind of work Indian brains were doing, where does that leave us? What is the future of a country whose rise was built on selling cognition, in a world where cognition is increasingly priced in electricity and GPUs instead of wages?
Chor Pharn ends on a relatively optimistic note about what India could still build if it chooses to focus on energy, compute, and industrial depth. But it’s hard to ignore the anxiety underneath that optimism, given how many people depend on services work and how incomplete our industrial and manufacturing base still is. It’s a sobering read if you’re Indian—and I think it’s essential reading.