NEWS HIGHLIGHTS
Theme : Technological Advancements
Paper : GS - 3
National Strategy on Artificial Intelligence released by NITI Aayog in 2018 highlights the massive potential of AI in solving complex social challenges faced by Indian citizens across areas such as agriculture, health, and education.
India still has conventional policing. AI based products open a new window of opportunity to do predictive policing in India. With the help of AI, one can predict the pattern of crime, analyze a lot of CCTV footage which are available across the country to identify suspects.
TABLE OF CONTENT
- Context
- Artificial Intelligence
- Benefits of AI
- Challenges of AI
- India & AI
- Global Standards
- Road Ahead
Context :
National Strategy on Artificial Intelligence released by NITI Aayog in 2018 highlights the massive potential of AI in solving complex social challenges faced by Indian citizens across areas such as agriculture, health, and education.
Artificial Intelligence :
- It is a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers.
- It describes the action of machines accomplishing tasks that have historically required human intelligence.
- It includes technologies like machine learning, pattern recognition, big data, neural networks, self algorithms etc.
- Examples : Facebook’s facial recognition software which identifies faces in the photos we post, the voice recognition software that translates commands we give to Alexa, etc are some of the examples of AI already around us.
Benefits of AI :
- India still has conventional policing. AI based products open a new window of opportunity to do predictive policing in India. With the help of AI, one can predict the pattern of crime, analyze a lot of CCTV footage which are available across the country to identify suspects.
- The government is digitizing all the records, especially the crime records, putting it into one single place called CCTNS where all the data including the image, biometrics, or the criminal history of a convict or suspect is available.
- In Agriculture: It has many uses, for example, it can help sense one how much water the crop needs.
- For solving complex issues like efficient utilization of available resources.
- Analyzing the Data: The AI technology helps in analyzing data and thus can improve the efficiency of the systems like power management in cars, mobile devices, weather predictions, video and image analysis.
Challenges of AI :
- There are problems emerging in facial recognition technologies,which are used to access our phones,bank accounts and apartments, and are increasingly employed by law enforcement authorities, in identifying women and darker-skinned people.
- While India and China together constitute approximately a third of the world’s population, Google Brain estimated that they form just 3% of images used inImageNet, a widely used dataset.
- The right to privacy is under threat, obviously considering the possibility of unauthorized access to one’s online activity data. But even in the case of an offline user?,?somebody who has deliberately decided to stay ‘disconnected’?,? the right to privacy is still under threat, like a disconnected user moving through a ‘smart city’.
India & AI :
- According to a Canada based company’s report, Global AI Report 2019, India stood at the ninth position in terms of the number of AI specialists working in the field.
- The US, China and the UK topped the list.
- India, on the contrary, lacks the opportunities in formal education in data science but is slowly trying to encourage the adoption of AI in educational institutes.
- Starting this year, the CBSE has AI as an elective subject for its ninth grade classes.
- IIT Hyderabad has launched a full fledged Bachelor of Technology (B Tech) program in AI becoming the first Indian educational institution to do so.
- It is also most likely the third educational institute in the world after Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to have a full fledged B Tech program on AI.
- IIIT Hyderabad is another educational institute that introduced popular executive programs on AI and machine learning and blockchain and distributed ledger technologies.
Global Standards :
- 193 countries reached an agreement at UNESCO on how AI should be designed and used by governments and tech companies:
- It aims to fundamentally shift the balance of power between people, and the businesses and governments developing AI.
- Countries which are members of UNESCO have agreed to implement this recommendation by enacting actions to regulate the entire AI system life cycle, ranging from research, design and development to deployment and use.
- It establishes the need to keep control over data in the hands of users, allowing them to access and delete information as needed.
- It also calls on member states to ensure that appropriate safeguards schemes are devised for the processing of sensitive data and effective accountability, and redress mechanisms are provided in the event of harm.
- In a number of countries, the principles of the recommendation are already being used in AI regulation and policy, demonstrating their practical viability. Finland provides an example of good practice in this regard,with its 2017 AI Strategy.
Road Ahead :
- To ensure that the full potential of these technologies is reached, the right incentives for ethical AI governance need to be established in national and subnational policy.
- The governments must use affirmative action to make sure that women and minority groups are fairly represented on AI design teams. This could take the form of quota systems that ensure that these teams are diverse or the form of dedicated funds from their public budgets to support such inclusion programmes.