Express View on AI summit in Delhi: India’s challenge
19.12.23
Last week’s international summit on Artificial Intelligence in Delhi highlighted India’s expansive ambition to be a power to reckon with in this new technological domain and a leader in shaping its global governance. The Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence — an interministerial forum of 28 countries and the European Union — was set up in 2020 to promote cooperation in AI and develop rules for its safe and responsible use. India has been a founding member of this forum.
The Delhi summit comes when the revolution in AI is set to accelerate at a dizzying pace and produce long-term social, political, economic and military consequences for the world. Many nations — from mighty America and China to tiny Singapore and the UAE — are scrambling to intensify their national quests to develop AI and broaden international partnerships. In his opening remarks at the forum, Prime Minister Narendra Modi recognised the salience of the moment and laid out a broad set of markers for India’s national development of AI and outlined a balanced global approach to promoting the beneficial uses of the new technology and limiting its potentially massive harms.
Translating PM’s goals into practical outcomes will, however, test the cumbersome ways of India’s administrative state that must now deal with a rapidly changing technological landscape in artificial intelligence and respond to the policy imperatives it presents. The NDA government’s successful recent push on semiconductor manufacture in India gives hope; but the scale of the effort involved in AI is far more demanding. The Indian enthusiasm for AI at the level of highest political leadership and the popular level will need to be matched quickly to overcome critical weaknesses. One is the lack of massive computing power — “compute” in the AI jargon.
In his address to the forum, PM Modi referred to the planned launch of the national AI mission that aims to strengthen India’s compute capabilities. AI systems need large volumes of data to train on. PM Modi hinted that the government agencies could release the large volumes of data in their possession. He will have his hands full, though, in compelling the Indian state to shed its entrenched habit of hoarding data. India must also invest massively in basic sciences, including mathematics, material sciences, computer sciences, linguistics, and neurosciences.
Delhi must also focus on multiplying manifold the number of engineers in AI-related technologies quickly. The demands on the external front, too, are immense. Through 2024, India will preside over the work of GPAI in developing norms for the responsible development and use of AI. This is a deeply contested arena not just between the democracies and autocracies but also within the West and between North and South. That Delhi has not decided on how exactly to proceed in the global governance of AI is reflected in its reluctance to sign several recent declarations on responsible civilian and military uses of AI. If India wants to lead in constructing a new global architecture for AI, it must shed some of its past multilateral baggage and develop an approach rooted in the first principles of national interest and collective global good.
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