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."