India's Attitude to AI

The West increasingly sees AI as a dangerous thing, something that is/will be used for bad things, lead to job losses and social upheaval. The extreme versions of such fears involve Terminator like scenarios where AI takes over the world.

 

On the other hand, India views AI as a means to solve societal problems and gaps for which the country (and thus its government) is too poor to solve. The history of how other countries solved these in the past is often proving irrelevant, like how India achieved huge telecom penetration by bypassing copper wires (history) to wireless (modern and a lot cheaper). AI is like that – it opens the door to find patterns. The Internet in general and the world of sensors that is increasingly integrated with the Internet produces voluminous data on just about everything. How longs are trucks idling at checkpoints? How long does it take for goods to move from A to B? Crunching so much unstructured data is beyond human or conventional software. AI, on the other hand, can crunch it and find patterns and even propose solutions. Many such uses raise privacy concerns in the West, but India with fewer existing systems and lower effectiveness of governance feels the benefits outweigh the risks.

 

Rahul Matthan mentions a different kind of use of AI in India. As we know all too well, learning to read is a critical life skill. Kids who don’t learn to read well struggle to read the ever-increasing books (and content on blackboards) in higher classes, which impacts their learning. But each child learns to read at a different speed, and no teacher can switch to a different speed for each kid. From 2023, Tamil Nadu started its Mozhigal program to improve reading skills. How does it work? Children on the program are asked to read a line on the screen. Aloud. The AI compares what they say against the words onscreen and progressively identifies the “syllables and phonemes that they are having trouble comprehending”. Then the AI develops customized training material accordingly. As they start to master the initially problematic syllables and phonemes, the AI then changes focus on words the child struggles with. Progressively, the child’s familiarity and speed of reading improves. I feel Matthan’s line describes India’s attitude to AI:

“The real promise of artificial intelligence lies in the practical uses to which this technology can be put. We need many more applications like this.”

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