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8 mins read, Jun 7, 2023, 04:15 AM IST

There is a scene in James Camerons Terminator 2: Judgment Day when Arnold Schwarzeneggers Terminator turns to a crying John Connor and asks, What's wrong with your eyes?If many eminent voices from scientists to researchers to AI pioneers to whatever Elon Musk is are to be believed, that is what the big AI debate distills down to. The ability to cry. To feel. To be human. To be alive even. This aint no hyperbole.Mitigating the risk of

There is a scene in James Camerons Terminator 2: Judgment Day when Arnold Schwarzeneggers Terminator turns to a crying John Connor and asks, What's wrong with your eyes?If many eminent voices from scientists to researchers to AI pioneers to whatever Elon Musk is are to be believed, that is what the big AI debate distills down to. The ability to cry. To feel. To be human. To be alive even. This aint no hyperbole.Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.That was the pretty damning statement, signed by OpenAIs Sam Altman, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and a slew of other AI experts, journalists, policymakers and released by the AI Center for Safety last week.What effect will all of this really have? The transformative economic benefits of the AI genie will ensure that it wont be put back in the bottle. But with the noise getting louder, AI could see more moves by more countries toward global regulation, both from an economic and geopolitical perspective.In all of this, Indias voice must be louder.One in every six humans is an Indian, and that alone should be reason enough for the country to influence the future of this technology that will change everything.Indias need to step inAsk ordinary folks about AI and their replies would be influenced by the plots of your average science fiction movie. Immediate issues like the loss of jobs, inherent bias of the underlying data, and the use of AI to create misinformation have not really permeated popular consciousness.In this context, it is in Indias interest to step into this debate, take cognisance of the good, while creating safeguards for the not-so-good.Max Tegmark, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the president of the Future of Life Institute, which put out a recent letter calling for a pause on AI, believes that India would be one of the countries that are most likely to get sc****d by a lack of international regulation. That is because of the concentration of power that the winner both in terms of countries and companies will have.India has everything to gain from a little bit of a pause to level the playing field so that all the companies doing this are doing it safely. We need to establish clear safety guidelines that future AI releases have to satisfy, Tegmark says. For example, you can't just go build a nuclear reactor on Connaught Place in New Delhi, without meeting established safety requirements. In this bizarre situation with AI, there's almost no meaningful regulation, he points out.Timnit Gebru (DAIR), Emily M. Bender (University of Washington), Angelina McMillan-Major (University of Washington), and Margaret Mitchell (Hugging Face), who had published a seminal paper on AI, together listed key issues that should be dealt with in AI. In their words these are,1. Worker exploitation and massive data theft to create products that profit a handful of entities.2. The explosion of synthetic media in the world, which both reproduces systems of oppression and endangers our information ecosystem.3. The concentration of power in the hands of a few people which exacerbates social inequities.These are issues of particular import in India, the first from the point of view of big tech companies which are at the forefront of productisation of AI systems. India is among the largest markets by number of users for many of the companies behind these AI products. It is likely one of the single biggest sources of data.India has suffered from issues like widening inequity and misinformation affecting the democratic discourse. The country cannot afford to not have a significant share of the value, as well as muscle unlocked by data, staying with Big Tech.Indias approach to AI has broadly been underpinned by #AIforAll, a philosophy that comes from a 2018 document published by government think-tank Niti Aayog, and coming out of the broader tech-as-a-public-good direction the country has taken. Daniel Leufer, senior policy analyst at civil liberties collective Access Now says that the conversation around the exploitation and illicit data harvesting practices underlying the development of these systems should be at the front and centre.Self-regulation isnt enoughCurrently, much of the talk about control in AI finds relevance through self-regulation.OpenAI claims that as their systems get closer to AGI (artificial general intelligence), we are becoming increasingly cautious with the creation and deployment of our models. Our decisions will require much more caution than society usually applies to new technologies, and more caution than many users would like.This, while addressing a problem, highlights just how much the industry is reliant on self-regulation. That will not do. What does "increasingly cautious mean and how is more caution defined?Wesley J. Wildman, professor of philosophy, theology, and ethics, and of computing and data sciences at Boston University points out, What we must do is focus on managing short-to-medium-term economic disruption.Brain Green, director of technology ethics, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics adds that any short moratoriums are not likely to have long-term effects on AI development. Computing resources, data sets, and algorithms would continue to advance.As Mahesh Makhija, technology consulting leader, EY India says, The genie is already out of the bottle and it is not easy at this stage to stop the development of generative AI technology. If tech leaders decide to pause on this, it may slow down the advancements, but others in the space will quickly fill this gap, says Or Levi, VP of Data Science at Zefr, a US-headquartered data and technology solutions company, adding that open-source communities, as they exist today, will continue advancing regardless. Stopping these advancements from progressing is currently impossible to enforce.Since the entities at play are private sector entities listed in one country, they will have shareholder pressure to productise AI, and any move to the contrary would be dealt with in Wall Streets usual route of shaving billions of market cap. Would the CEOs and boards of Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others really stand for that? What the likes of Max Tegmark are asking for immediately is explainability essentially the flowchart of how an AI arrived at an output. As he says, This question of figuring out what's actually going on inside of the black box of AI, is key in AI safety research.India has leverage, since the country is one of the largest sources of user data for many of the companies developing these systems, owing to the heft of its population. This gives India an opportunity to dictate what works for the country. There may also be a few guiding principles the world can take away from Indias #AIforAll policy. As A Damodaran, distinguished professor in the digital economy, start-up and innovation (DESI) team at ICRIER points out, inclusivity and responsible deployment are critical. The weaponisation issueThen there is the problem of nation-states and weaponisation of AI. As a 2022 paper from the United Nations Institute of Disarmament Research points out, What is certain is that the increased adoption of AI will introduce new risks to international security that traditional instruments of risk/incident prevention and management may not be adequate to address.As a paper by Brookings Institution has previously stated, The Chinese military and defence industry have undertaken active initiatives in research, development, and experimentation (of AI weapons).India already lags behind China in conventional weapon systems. China has far more nuclear warheads at an estimated 400+ compared to Indias estimated 160+ warheads. The country has already seen Chinese aggression in the borders as well as in cyber warfare.It is in Indias interest to help create multilateral interventions just as the world rallied to ban chemical weapons in the mid-1990s and biological weapons in the mid-1970s.In November 2021, members of UNESCO adopted an agreement that defines the common values and principles needed to ensure the healthy development of AI. While this is a good starting point, these are not binding agreements. Unless there are binding agreements with accountability and transparency baked in, the weaponisation of this technology will continue unabated. And this needs to happen in an immediate time frame. That has been the great tragedy in the UN Dialogue on Cyber Norms, which has failed to arrive at even something as fundamental as defining a hostile act on the Internet, even after years of discussions. The world, and India cannot afford a repeat. (This was the second part of our two-part series on AI and how it impacts India. You can read the first part of this series by following this link.)

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Indias voice must be heard louder in the global artificial intelligence debate. Heres why. - Economic Times