AI superpower or client nation?

AI superpower or client nation?

Article:

1. Parminder Jeet Singh associated with Bengaluru based NGO emphasized that industrial revolution moved the centres of physical power from human and animal bodies to machines.

Important Analysis:

2. Google’s CEO compares Artificial intelligence with fire and electricity in terms of their role in human civilization.

3. But, Stephen Hawking feared that AI could end humanity.

4. Radical transformation:

• AI systems are set to transform economic, social and political organisation.
• Intelligent systems tend to centralize and monopolise control.
• AI economy will radically concentrate income and wealth.
• Many global digital industry leaders have called for assured basic income for all.
• Globally, just one or two concentrations of AI power may rule the world. Currently, these are in the U.S. and China.

5. India’s stand in the AI race:

• It is fast squandering its great advantages of high IT capabilities and a big domestic market required for data harvesting.
• AI does not develop in laboratories.
• AI develops within business processes, as data are mined from digital platforms and used into intelligence.
• Any country’s AI largely exists within its huge, domestically owned commercial digital/data systems.
• In the U.S. it is with Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft — and in China with Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent.
• India does not possess large domestically owned commercial data systems.

6. Google and Microsoft are partnering with U.S. military on AI applications, and China’s companies even more closely so with its military.

7. The digital/AI industry works in huge ecosystems with global digital corporations at the centre, and various start-ups and specific digital/AI applications at the peripheries.

8. Start-ups everywhere, including in India, are mostly vying to find a place in such huge global ecosystems, anchored either in the U.S. or China, generally by being bought out.

9. The Niti Aayog’s new AI strategy whether related to increased agricultural output, precision medicine or tailored learning is basically shop-window of global digital/AI corporations.

10. Suggestions for India to became an AI superpower:

• Controlling huge commercial data ecosystems.
• Technologies should flow freely across the globe.
• Welcome global technology companies to help India’s digital development.
• Data-based sectoral platforms, like in e-commerce, urban transport, agriculture, health and education, etc, should largely be domestic.
• India needs to provide domestic protection through policy, if India begins to treat its collective social/economic data as a strategic national asset.
• Such policy protection will ensure that large-scale data driven Indian companies able to develop the highest AI in every sector.
• Once enough AI proficiency and strength has been developed domestically, it should then be used to go global.
• With its highest IT as well as entrepreneurial/managerial competence, and a huge domestic market, India is among extremely few countries that can make it.