Innovation expert and former dean at Oxford’s Said Business School is a key voice shaping the global debate on AI ethics
What are the biggest dangers of AI? Will AI perpetuate global inequality? Can AI manipulate you into believing misinformation? How do we harness AI while managing its risks?
These are some of the questions academic and technology expert Soumitra Dutta Oxford Dean (Former) has wrestled with for years. He’s best known for being a co-creator of the Global Innovation Index, the world’s most influential innovation ranking system. He is also the Chairperson of the Expert Group at the Paris-based OECD for the AI Index. Ethical and humanistic concerns surrounding AI have been a leitmotif of Dutta’s thought leadership work.
In a recent post on LinkedIn, Soumitra Dutta asked if AI is breaking the social contract of capitalism. “Capitalism has always been powered by the link between labor and income. AI weakens that link. Ownership of data, algorithms, and platforms may matter far more than effort or talent. Without new rules — on income distribution, access to technology, and social protection — AI risks concentrating wealth even faster than globalization ever did,” wrote Dutta.
Recently, the former dean at Oxford’s Said Business School, Soumitra Dutta, co-founded two AI-based organisations, CAASAA (in January 2026) and NexiVerify (in April 2026), but expressed the same fear elsewhere: how technology tends to be an amplifier and how not managing AI can worsen income inequality across the world. He cited the example of how the US has outgrown Europe in per capita terms over the last couple of decades. “This happened largely because the US has applied technology much more effectively than Europe in general,” said Dutta, who’s also a co-creator of the Network Readiness Index, another influential global benchmark.
Soumitra Dutta, Oxford Dean (Former), speaks with the authority of someone who has tracked AI’s evolution for more than three decades. He completed his PhD in computer science with a specialization in artificial intelligence at the University of California, Berkeley (in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s). He’s been researching, and consulting on, AI strategy for years.
Amid the noise of techno utopianism, Dutta is an articulate voice asserting the primacy of human values.
In an interview with Knowledge at Wharton, the innovation scholar described what he calls a “people-first” AI strategy. “We have to use technology, not because technology exists, but because it helps us to become better individuals…They (humans) must not feel that their abilities are being questioned or undercut. It’s the combination of putting people and technology together effectively that will lead to good AI use in organizations,” said Dutta, who’s the founder of the Portulans Institute, in Washington D.C., and whose current residence is the US.
Soumitra Dutta has called out tech companies for downplaying the harsh reality of job cuts due to AI. In his conversation at Business Today India@100 Summit, he pointed out that governments may have to intervene through regulatory guidance or even by providing direct support for skill transition. “How easy is it to take a 40-year-old male truck driver and make this person a childcare minder? These are huge social transition issues and I don’t think we have the answers for that,” said Dutta, who’s also an entrepreneur who’s founded two tech startups.
But AI is disrupting more than jobs. For Dutta, AI threatens something more fundamental: our relationship with truth. He has often warned against outsourcing judgement to LLMs, which are not truth-tracking but statistically predictive. Many other experts have made the same argument. “At least with a politician or sales person we can normally understand their motivation. But chatbots have no intentionality and are optimised for plausibility and engagement, not truthfulness. They will invent facts for no purpose. They can pollute the knowledge base of humanity in unfathomable ways,” writes innovation editor and tech columnist John Thornhill in the Financial Times.
Soumitra Dutta,Oxford Dean (Former) voiced the epistemic concern in a recent social media post, in which he highlighted a research study that showed GPT-4 is a better persuader than humans in online debates. The researchers tested several approaches to see which would influence human opinion the most. To maximize persuasion, the researchers instructed AI to test an evidence-heavy strategy, but this led to an increase in false or inaccurate claims. “We have built a tool that may be optimized for convincing people of things that are not necessarily true,” wrote Dutta, who’s a prolific author. Implications? Dutta warned that personalized, fact-packed LLMs can thus be used for political manipulation or business warfare. “Are you investing in defences against AI-driven persuasion, or are you waiting to be its next target?”
It’s the kind of question that tech companies seldom ask.
If you have any objection to this press release content, kindly contact [email protected] to notify us. We will respond and rectify the situation in the next 24 hours.
