Wisdom from the Thirukkural
Before proceeding, we want to name the fact that the Thirukkural is a living text that is actively read, memorised, debated, analysed, interpreted, and loved by Tamil-speaking communities world over. The Thirukkural is not a historical artifact, but rather a text that people carry with them into their everyday lives. It is a grounded principle offering meaningful wisdom to anchor action and thought. As we acknowledge this, we also want to make space for the critique that has named the presence of patriarchal ideas within the Thirukkural and acknowledge critique that has called out Brahminical interpretations of the Thirukkural. We also do recognize the expansive feminist interpretations and attempts to reclaim the text from casteist and patriarchal readings. We approach it as learners, and recognize that this interpretation will be partial at best, for the full richness of the text emerges when it is encountered in Tamil. We have tried to honour its depth without losing sight of the limits of our reading. We welcome correction, expansion, and deeper engagement.
The Thirukkural: A Snapshot
The Thirukkural is one of the oldest and most revered texts in the Tamil literary tradition. It is a collection of 133 chapters with 10 verses each, all in Tamil. The text is attributed to the poet-sage Thiruvalluvar. While the date of composition continues to be debated, most scholarly estimates suggest that it was written between the third century BCE and fifth century CE. In sum, for over 2000 years now, the Thirukkural has endured as a significant text for the Tamil-speaking communities across the world.
The text is organized into three books: Aram (virtue and ethics), Porul (governance and material life), and Inbam (love and joy). This structure in itself is a powerful offering for governance to reflect on, as it recognizes ethics, politics, and human flourishing as fundamentals for a single integrated life. This tells us that a governance framework that neglects any one attribute is incomplete and inadequate.
The Thirukkural is explicitly secular, with the core ethics being grounded in reason, observation, and attention to human flourishing. The text speaks across religious traditions and has been claimed and read by people from various religious backgrounds, without this universalism diluting the text’s specific Tamil identity. The Thirukkural also addresses the continuum from the personal to the political with equal seriousness and care, and does not see them as operating in silos. It understands human existence as a whole that depends on the qualities of thinking, relating, and acting that constitute it.
Wisdom from the Thirukkural and AI Governance
The Thirukkural grounds us in a coherent, integrated account of what human life is for, and in the process names what any technology that shapes, affects, alters, and drives human life must answer to. It grounds us in the understanding that a reflection on the safety and efficiency of a tool is not enough, because we must look at whether it serves virtue, good governance, and genuine human flourishing. A few concepts from the Thirukkural are presented below as a starting point in engaging with provocations for governance. Put together, it offers an integrated ethical vision.
Aram (அறம்): Virtue as lived practice
Aram is a foundational concept of the Thirukkural, with the entire text opening with the concept. A rough English translation of the concept is virtue, righteousness, or moral duty. However, in its Tamil usage, there is greater texture that gets flattened in the process of translation. It is not an abstract principle, but refers to virtue that becomes concrete through action and habit. Aram is practiced and embodied in action and is known by the results it produces, such as in the quality of relationships, care for the vulnerable, and integrity maintained when no one is watching.
In the context of AI governance, Aram tells us to go beyond intent to pay attention to impact. Today, the AI industry and key political actors have developed sophisticated vocabulary signalling ethical commitment in the form of “responsible AI,” “ethical AI,” “human-centric AI,” and “trustworthy AI” among others. However, there are major gaps between the stated values and actual practice. Against this background, Aram teaches us that the values an organisation claims don’t tell us as much as what its actions do, about its actual commitments. It tells us that governance should evaluate AI developers and governance institutions by the concrete quality of their actions and not by the ethics documentation. It asks us to look into the real world and pay attention to what was built, who was harmed in the process, what they did when they found out about the harm, and if change ensued as a result. Aram reminds us that virtue is a practice that must be held consistently, even when consistency is costly, resource-intensive, and time-intensive.
Inbam (இன்பம்): Joy and the fullness of human flourishing
Inbam is one of the three pillars of the Thirukkural, and refers to joy, pleasure, and the fullness of human flourishing. It treats the pursuit of genuine human joy as one of the proper ends of life, rather than as a peripheral indulgence or a distraction from ethical life. A life without Inbam is a life that has not been fully lived. Inbam refers to the joy that comes from deep relationships, meaningful work, living in alignment with one’s values, and genuine connections with others and the world at large. It sees joy as a significant component inherent in the quality of life, and not as a fleeting experience.
While most AI governance frameworks are focused on harm-prevention, they stop with asking about the risks a system poses, the rights it violates, the harms it causes, and the paradigms (legal and policy) that it violates. However, Inbam invites us to go beyond this to recognize that a system that causes no harm, but also makes human life thinner, more disconnected, isolated, and distracted, is not a governance success. Existing governance frameworks may be committed to addressing harm, but do little to nothing to unlock flourishing. Systems that are being built and deployed must make human life richer, more connected, more meaningful, and more joyful, and Inbam invites a deeper reflection on whether the metrics used to evaluate AI systems (such as engagement, efficiency, safety, and productivity) are truly adequate proxies for the richer goal of enabling human well-being and flourishing. If we exclude this focus, Inbam reminds us, we are systemically missing something essential, and settling for existence over thriving.
Porul (பொருள்): Wealth, resources, and their right use
Porul refers to material wealth, resources, and the practical conditions of life. The second book of the Thirukkural focuses on Porul, and includes within its scope governance, statecraft, and economic life. However, Porul transcends a neutral description of material things to constitute an ethical category where wealth has moral valence that depends entirely on how it is acquired and used. Accordingly, the Thirukkural tells us that wealth acquired through injustice, exploitation, and the suffering of others is not genuine Porul, but rather, a corrupt version of it. In the process, it is a form of harm. For wealth to genuinely constitute Porul, it must be acquired through honest effort and used in ways that serve the larger community, support the vulnerable, and contribute to conditions of shared well-being and flourishing.
Much of what the AI industry is built on is wealth, particularly in the form of information, data, and natural resources like water and land, without offering anything in return. AI is built through labour conditions that are harmful, exploitative, and psychologically devastating. It is actively generating extraordinary amounts of wealth, particularly in the form of profits and power, that is consistently concentrated in the hands of a remarkably small number of corporations, investors, and individuals. The Thirukkural reminds us that this wealth does not constitute genuine Porul, for AI is normalizing a regime where benefits are privatized and harm is socialized.
Porul tells us that governance should treat the political economy of AI as an ethical question, instead of as an economic one. It asks us to pay attention to who acquired the wealth and how, and who was excluded, harmed, or made more vulnerable through its acquisition and use. It also asks us to see how it is being used, showing us that instead of the communities whose knowledge and labour make AI possible, it is the ones who already hold power that are benefitting. Porul reminds us that these questions are not supplementary to the larger focus of AI governance, but the grounding wisdom that should inform governance.
Natpu (நட்பு): The ethics of genuine friendship and mutual accountability
The Thirukkural talks about Natpu, which has been translated to mean friendship. However, the account of the terminology in the Thirukkural is considerably more rigorous and wholesome than the English word usually implies. It calls attention to genuine friendship and considers it a relationship of mutual accountability, where a true friend is an anchor that tells you the truth, stands by you, and holds you to your better self because they care for your sustained well-being instead of momentary comfort. It is not about a superficial or false friendship that flatters, agrees, and entertains without challenging or correcting, and reminds us that a false friendship does more harm than no friendship.
Generative AI systems that are designed to maximize engagement tend to optimize for the experience of agreeability (in extreme cases, sycophancy), validation, and entertainment. Recommendation algorithms make content that confirms existing beliefs and ideas available. Conversational systems are trained to be pleasant and agreeable. Most of these platforms are built to sustain engagement by giving a user what they want and encouraging them to seek more. However, when seen through the lens of Natpu, the Thirukkural helps us see that these systems offer a false friendship, a superficial relationship that offers no ethical substance.
Natpu gives us a lens to reframe the relationship between AI governance institutions and the communities they govern. This would require honest accountability that cuts both ways: Governance institutions tell communities the full truth about AI systems, what they do, where they are deployed, and how they are built and trained, and communities hold governance institutions accountable for the gap between their stated commitments and their actual performance. Performative responsiveness and form traps that look like a lot of busy-ness that goes nowhere, in the form of tokenistic consultation processes, vast repertoires of documentation with little follow-up, and add-ethics-and-stir approaches, is a deviation from the true meaning of Natpu. Natpu tells to look for whether an AI system or governance institution is capable of genuine accountability and relationality, and ultimately serving the real well-being of those it relates to, rather than the monetary satisfaction of a few.
Arivudaimai (அறிவுடைடை): Wisdom born of deep experience
Arivudaimai refers to a form of wisdom that cannot be acquired from study, principles, textual information, and technical expertise alone. It refers to wisdom that comes from a deep and sustained engagement with the world, emerging from living with a problem long enough to understand it from within. It is the kind of wisdom that comes from experience, attention, and time. Communities hold this wisdom in the lived experiences, perspectives, and practices of their elders and all those that have been present through difficulty. They come to understand things intimately in ways that someone looking from a distance cannot.
The Thirukkural’s respect for wisdom teaches us that it is irreplaceable. It is not hubristic or driven by ego, in that this knowledge is not superior to other forms of knowing, but is also not reducible to them, either. Arivudaimai recognizes embodied, experienced knowledge, and helps us recognize that governance that lacks access to this knowledge is more likely to make decisions that are technically correct but humanly wrong.
AI governance is mostly shaped by people with expertise in the technical, legal, and/or academic sense. While this is valuable and important expertise, it has the tendency to both be limited in focus and capable of replicating systemic and structural rigidity, bias, and in some instances, violence. Arivudaimai tells us that there are lived experiences that should have a critical seat at the table in shaping governance. It tells us that there are communities that live with the consequences of the entire AI lifecycle: Exploited workers, people and communities whose data are used to train AI, people and communities who are subject to surveillance, people and communities who are displaced by the construction of infrastructure for the AI ecosystem to operate, the environment that is destroyed by the development of AI, and the many diverse communities whose identities are flattened to atomized datapoints. It tells us that there are people whose lives, livelihoods, and life chances are shaped by algorithms and AI systems that they cannot see or contest fairly.
Arivudaimai asks us to recognize that these communities carry a form of knowledge on what AI is actually doing in the world that no technical analysis, regulatory review, or legislative framework can suitably replicate, govern, or address. When governance does not treat this experiential wisdom as a significant and valid source of knowledge, it risks misunderstanding what it is governing. It will produce frameworks that address the problems visible from a distance while missing the ones that matter most to those closest to them. Arivudaimai asks us to pay close attention to whose wisdom shapes AI governance, and whose deep knowledge and experience of living with the consequences of AI is being treated as an outlying anecdote rather than evidence.
Therinthu Seyalvagai (தெரிந்து செயல்வகை): Right action after due consideration
In the Thirukkural, Therinthu Seyalvagai refers to the right thing to do after due consideration for the specific set of presenting circumstances, relationships, and responsibilities at a particular moment in time. It asks us to root our actions in context, by paying attention to the realities of a material situation and allow that to determine governance, rather than impose frameworks externally. It tells us that the outcomes of our actions are a function of their impact on prevalent material realities, and that without due consideration for these realities, actions can produce harm.
The Thirukkural shows us the importance of recognizing that what is right at a given point in time depends on who the people involved are, what relationships they are embedded in, what they owe to whom, how the situation in question came about, and what the situation itself requires. In sum, the Thirukkural tells us not to look for universalisms. Different contexts in themselves show us that no universal rule can produce the right action across all circumstances. True wisdom lies in reading a situation correctly and responding to what is actually there, instead of applying a predetermined formula.
Through Therinthu Seyalvagai, the Thirukkural tells us that there are genuine ethical truths and that there are some actions that are genuinely better than others given the material realities inherent in a particular context. But, it insists that such truths are not accessible through abstract principles. Such truths require careful situated judgment that attends to context, relationships, and specific human realities of each situation.
AI governance at the moment has been approached through a universalist lens. The race to regulate in the AI context seems very similar to the approach to regulating privacy, where Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was templatized and informed legislation world over, with scant regard for the material realities that distinguished individual contexts from the European one. Frameworks that are developed predominantly in Western institutional contexts are being applied globally, with no meaningful effort toward adapting to radically different cultural, social, economic, and political contexts where AI operates. Communities have different understandings of privacy, consent, agency, and commons. The assumption that a single, universalist framework can govern everyone in a single frame risks flattening and erasing diversity.
Therinthu Seyalvagai offers guidance in the form of inviting governance to treat contextual judgment as an irreducible component, rather than as a problem to be eliminated through universalism. It shows us the value that comes from treating governance as an ongoing practice that reads situations correctly and responds to specific material realities instead of demanding compliance to a singular universalist standard. It calls on us to build governance frameworks that make space for contextual judgment instead of trying to replace it with standardized procedures.
Timeless Wisdom
The Thirukkural offers plenty of insights that can shape our relationship with AI and its governance. Put together, these ideas ground us in recognizing the richness of the world we inhabit. Our experiences as humans are significantly altered by our positionalities, privileges, oppressions, power, and lived experiences. In combination, these factors produce material realities that need to be acknowledged and centred in governance practice. The wisdom documented in the Thirukkural is a powerful starting point in moving in this direction.
References
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