Fears of AI Abound, but Potential and Opportunities Prevail: MEITY Secretary

The dread around AI taking over and its ill-effects reasonably exists, but India's potential to seize the opportunity overpowers it, MEITY Secretary said on Wednesday. While delivering a keynote address at the Global India AI Summit, the Ministry of Electronics and IT Secretary S Krishnan said the risks of AI are is much more exaggerated on the western side of the world. Krishnan said there is hope, expectation, and potential in India, driven by its education system, and that a lot of the background AI work, AI adaptation, and application building can be done in India far more economically than elsewhere.

"That possibly represents an opportunity for the Indian youth and sort of replaces some proportion of Indian jobs with higher paying and better jobs than they are today," Krishnan said.

He said it could be a trade-off for India here, although it may be a genuine fret for other parts of the world. Talking about the societal and personal harms of AI, like impersonation, misinformation, disinformation, invasion of privacy, he said those are real fears that the world may just have to live with.

"Those fears are much more real in democracies than they are in other countries... that's where guardrails, regulations of some form, declarations become important," he said.

When you have a lot of misinformation or fake information, the crucial thing that you need is to have a mechanism by which you're able to actually identify the right information, he noted. He added that it could also affect democratic rights.

Democracy is about people being able to make choices -- from rightful information, and if that information is fake, then it is a serious concern, he said. He said everyone tends to look at technology with a great deal of suspicion when it first emerges, with most believing that it could virtually be the end of the world.

"We have had several moments in industrial history where we have been very fearful of what impact technology will have, how it'll change our lives, and what it may do to all of us.

"There was a time during the first industrial revolution for people who opposed new technology coming in," Krishnan said.

But equally, they have always been enthusiasts for new technology, and that has led to a lot of technological change, development, and progress in human history, Krishnan said.

Referring to Hollywood movie Oppenheimer, Krishnan said it reminds of what can happen with new technology coming in, particularly if nuclear fusion is unleashed, and what impact it could have. He said the argument of fusion versus fission continues to exist.

"But in the end, we eventually adopted that technology, the guardrails or guidelines for using that technology also got established. There were international treaties and conventions," he said. There are lessons for us, in terms of how technology can be "used and not unleashed", he added.