NDTV World Summit 2025: Nick Booker Explains How Ancient India Made AI Possible

At the NDTV World Summit 2025 in New Delhi, researcher Nick Booker said that ancient India provided key intellectual foundations for today’s artificial intelligence and urged the world to turn to India again to guide AI’s future.

"The second most important super trend of the 21st century is the re-emergence of Indian civilisation," he said, adding, "We are now living in the first Indian decade of what will prove to be the Indian century."

Booker’s central claim is that India’s early advances in mathematics, language and astronomy seeded the modern, computational mindset.

"Let’s start with how did ancient India make artificial intelligence possible," he said. He cited the Śulba Sūtras’ geometric 'algorithmic thinking,' Panini’s 'formal language rules,' and Pingala’s 'binary combinatorics.'

These, he said, are discoveries "which went on to shape the modern world that we are all living in."

He connected those ideas to Europe’s scientific takeoff, showing medieval manuscripts that captured the first European uses of Hindu-Arabic numerals. "Indian ideas revolutionised European science," he said.

The centre of astronomical calculation was once set to Ujjain. He said, "The English actually thought in the 13th century… that the center of the world for their calculations was right here in India."

Nick Booker contrasted European and Indian ways of thinking. He said Europeans followed 'axiomatic model making' which means 'they believed in self-evident truths… creating a model and then you go out and you find the data and you kind of make it fit your model.

This can seem 'logical and rational,' he noted, but "isn’t necessarily grounded in reality. It’s grounded in a model that is then applied to reality."

By contrast, India focused on what Roddam Narasimha called 'computational positivism.'

"Looking at the world, looking at reality… and changing your models and your computations based on that reality," he said.

To show the difference, Booker used a playful example.

"All monkeys climb trees. The porcupine is a monkey. Therefore, the porcupine climbs trees." The logic is tidy, but "porcupines don’t climb trees," so a false premise ruins the conclusion.

"It accepts the axiom and concludes porcupine climbs trees, whereas computational positivism would reject the false premise based on data, based on experience," Booker added.

Booker then linked this to AI. He said, "Aligned and constitutional systems… can make these mistakes, while data-grounded systems will give you the answers in the data."

Finally, he praised India’s storytelling power and reiterated, "The mythology, the stories, the historical examples… help you spot connection and that is one of India’s great gifts to the world."