Dr. Arvind Kumar*
Artificial Intelligence is rapidly shaping the future of humanity across nearly every industry. It is already the main driver of emerging technologies like big data, robotics and IoT — not to mention generative AI, with tools like ChatGPT and AI art generators garnering mainstream attention — and it will continue to act as a technological innovator for the foreseeable future. As per the World Economic Forum report AI expenditure in India is expected to reach $11.78 billion by 2025 and add $1 trillion to India’s economy by 2035. Lots of industries go through the pattern of winter, winter, and then an eternal spring and we may be in the eternal spring of AI. It is impacting transportation, education, healthcare, manufacturing, customer care, media etc. Transparent processes of AI development are more important than ever.
With AI you can further your efficiency and improve productivity. As the scale and urgency of the economic and human health impacts from our deteriorating natural environment grows, we have an opportunity to look at how AI can help transform traditional sectors and systems to address climate change, deliver food and water security, build sustainable cities, and protect biodiversity and human wellbeing. There are still major breakthroughs that have to happen before we reach anything that resembles human-level AI. If implemented responsibly, AI can benefit society. However, as is the case with most emerging technology, there is a real risk that commercial and state use has a detrimental impact on human rights. Nevertheless are the challenges of AI real? Do organisations require humans to supervise the performance and output of these AI tools?
Challenges mostly co-exist with opportunities. The same goes for Artificial Intelligence. AI is posing considerable challenges for traditional jobs like Customer Care Support, Copy Writers, Data Entry Executives, etc., and opportunities for specialised jobs like AL and ML Engineers, Data Scientists, Hardware Specialists for AI, Data Labelling Professionals, etc. Humans and machines have different comparative strengths and weaknesses, and it’s about the combination of these two that will allow business processes and human intent to multiply in the coming years. Though India ranked second in the world in terms of number of people vulnerable to climate change, there was a lack of awareness of risks induced by disasters such as earthquakes, floods and drought. Economic losses kept increasing over the years due to reckless planning and development activities, especially in cities. Efficient regulations were in place to ensure safety in development projects, but their implementation needed tremendous improvement.
Steering the global South through AI
Emerging economies house 85% of the world’s population yet are often underrepresented in the global discourse around emerging technologies. This often leads to the development of international standards, principles, guidelines, and governance models that are not aligned with the needs of the developing world, overlooking the issues that primarily impact the Global South. Housing one-sixth of humanity India is perfectly positioned to play a vital role in global leadership and make global policy discourse on AI and emerging technologies more inclusive and representative. As one of the largest Global South economies leading the AI race, India has been entrusted with the responsibility of council chair for the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) for 3-year tenure (Incoming chair in 2022-23, lead chair in 2023-24 and outgoing chair in 2024-25).
Our demonstrated commitment to catalysing AI innovation in alignment with the principles of responsible AI played an instrumental role in helping India win this position through a two-thirds majority of first-preference votes. AI adoption in India is at an inflexion point. We have been ranked 1st for ‘AI Adoption by Organisations’ and 7th for ‘Number of newly funded AI companies’ (2013-21) by the Stanford AI Index 2022. The same Index places India 3rd for ‘No. of AI Journal Publications’ and ‘No. of AI Conferences’. Further, India has been ranked 1st in all 5 Pillars of Peak AI’s Decision Intelligence Maturity Scale, which assesses a business’s commercial AI readiness.
Way forward
As the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events continue to increase, cities are faced with the urgent need to adapt and build resilience to protect their infrastructure, economies, and citizens. In this context, artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a powerful tool that can help cities become more resilient and better prepared for the impacts of climate change. From early warning systems to evacuation models, artificial intelligence is behind a number of promising innovations for disaster risk reduction. In agriculture sector AI is used to provide farmers with customized notifications and short videos on a real-time basis, helping them plan and manage their crops more efficiently.
AI-based food quality assessment technology simplifies the process of on-spot quality standardization as well as fostering economic, social and ecological profits. UNEP’s platform like IQAir offer insights on the impact of real-time air quality on populations and help inform health protection measures and IMEO leverages AI to revolutionize the approach to monitoring and mitigating methane emissions. AI can help calculate the footprint of products across their full lifecycles and supply chains and enable businesses and consumers to make the most informed and effective decisions. AI could be used to simulate and automate the generation of zoning laws, building ordinances and floodplains, combined with augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR). Real-time city-wide data on energy, water consumption and availability, traffic flows, people flows, and weather could create an “urban dashboard” to optimise urban sustainability.
India’s presidency of GPAI comes at a time when India also has the G20 Presidency. This presents an opportunity to showcase India’s AI Prowess, Solutions, & Governance Models to the world. Through its unique approach to governance of Data and Emerging technologies, India has demonstrated how these can be harnessed to develop public digital platforms to build citizen-centric solutions at a population scale. These governance models that are better suited to the Global South, along with learnings from India’s AI for All approach, may be showcased on the global stage to promote their widespread adoption. The development of AI in private hands should aim to include public interests in realizing the potential of AI. Although AI presents a number of advantages for solving the current environmental challenges, but the potential environmental side effects are hard to ignore. Technology companies have often been lauded for their creativity and ingenuity, and they need to apply these skills to find solutions associated with artificial intelligence. We live in exciting times. It is now possible to tackle some of the world’s biggest problems with emerging technologies and it’s time to put AI to work for the planet.
*Editor, Focus Global Reporter
