Context
- India has recently been elected as the new chair of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI).
- In the election for the Council Chair, India received more than a two-thirds majority of the first-preference votes and was followed by Canada and the US, respectively.
In this article, we shall examine how Artificial Intelligence can be a game changer for India.
What is GPAI?
- GPAI is an international and multi-stakeholder initiative to guide the responsible development and use of AI, grounded in human rights, inclusion, diversity, innovation, and economic growth.
- Its establishment was announced during the 2018 G7 Summit by Canadian PM Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron. GPAI was officially launched on June 15, 2020
- It is the league of leading economies including India, USA, UK, EU, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, and Singapore.
- GPAI will be supported by a Secretariat, to be hosted by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris, as well as by two Centers of Expertise- one each in Montreal and Paris.
What makes it a special initiative?
- First of its kind: GPAI is the first initiative of its type for evolving better understanding of the challenges and opportunities around AI using the experience and diversity of participating countries.
- Collaboration: In order to achieve this goal, the initiative will look to bridge the gap between theory and practice on AI by supporting cutting-edge research and applied activities on AI-related priorities.
Aims and Objectives
- In collaboration with partners and international organizations, GPAI will bring together leading experts from industry, civil society, governments, and academia to collaborate to promote the responsible evolution of AI.
- It will also help evolve methodologies to show how AI can be leveraged to better respond to the global crisis since COVID-19.
Themes of working
- Responsible AI: RAI’s mandate aligns closely with that vision and GPAI’s overall mission, striving to foster and contribute to the responsible development, use and governance of human-centred AI systems, in congruence with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
- Data governance: It aims to collate evidence, shape research, undertake applied AI projects and provide expertise on data governance, to promote data for AI being collected, used, shared, archived and deleted in ways that are consistent with human rights, inclusion, diversity, innovation, economic growth, and societal benefit.
- Future of work: Its mandate is to conduct critical technical analysis on how the deployment of AI can affect workers and working environments as well as how workers and employers can better design the future of work.
- Innovation and commercialization: Its mandate is to study and recommend tools and methods to drive international collaboration on AI R&D and innovation,
About Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- AI is a constellation of technologies that enable machines to act with higher levels of intelligence and emulate the human capabilities of sense, comprehend and act.
- Thus, computer vision and audio processing can actively perceive the world around them by acquiring and processing images, sound and speech.
- Natural language processing and inference engines can enable AI systems to analyze and understand the information collected.
- An AI system can also take action through technologies such as expert systems and inference engines or undertake actions in the physical world.
- These human-like capabilities are augmented by the ability to learn from experience and keep adapting over time.
- AI systems are finding ever-wider application to supplement these capabilities across various sectors.
Potential of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence has the potential to provide huge value to different sectors and can become a key source of competitive advantage for firms.
(1) Healthcare: Helps address the issue of access to healthcare facilities, particularly in rural areas that suffer from poor connectivity and the limited supply of healthcare professionals.
(2) Agriculture
- It can address challenges such as inadequate demand prediction, lack of assured irrigation, and overuse/misuse of pesticides and fertilizers.
- Improves crop yield through real-time advisory, advanced detection of pest attacks, and prediction of crop prices to informed sowing practices.
(3) Smart Mobility, including Transports and Logistics
- Autonomous fleets for ride sharing,
- Semi-autonomous features such as driver assist, and
- Predictive engine monitoring and maintenance.
(4) Retail
To improve user experience and sale through:
- personalized suggestions,
- preference-based browsing
- image-based product search
- customer demand anticipation
- improved inventory management
- efficient delivery management
(5) Manufacturing: To create a flexible and adaptable technical system to automate processes and machinery to respond to unfamiliar or unexpected situations by making smart decisions.
(6) Energy: Energy system modelling and forecasting to decrease unpredictability and increase efficiency in power balancing and usage.
(7) Smart Cities: Integration of AI in smart cities and infrastructure help meet the demands of a rapidly urbanizing population and provides enhanced quality of life.
(8) Education and Skilling
- Improving the learning experience through personalized learning,
- automating and expediting administrative tasks, and
- Predicting the need for student intervention to reduce dropouts or recommend vocational training.
AI and Climate change
- AI is a disruptive paradigm that has greater potential to assess, predict, and mitigate the risk of climate change with the efficient use of data, learning algorithms, and sensing devices.
- It performs a calculation, makes predictions, and takes decisions to mitigate the impacts of climate change.
- By developing effective models for weather forecasting and environmental monitoring, AI makes us better understand the impacts of climate change across various geographical locations.
- It interprets climatic data and predicts weather events, extreme climate conditions, and other socio-economic impacts of climate change and precipitation.
- From a technical perspective, AI offers better climatic predictions, shows the impacts of extreme weather, finds the actual source of carbon emitters and includes numerous other reasonable contributions.
- This enables the policymakers to be aware of the rising sea levels, earth hazards, hurricanes, temperature change, disruption to natural habitats, and species extinction.
Applications of AI for Climate Change mitigation
The following are the few areas in which AI can directly help mitigate the risks posed by climate change:-
- AI-assisted prediction models for climate change mitigation
- Role of machine vision in climate informatics and forecasting
- Recent trends in AI to reduce carbon footprints for a sustainable environment
- AI for earth hazard management
- AI to promote eco-friendly energy production and consumption
- AI-assisted expert systems for climate change risk prediction and assessment
- AI-assisted big data analytics Synergy of IoT, big data, cloud computing, and AI techniques in climate change prediction and mitigation
- Machine learning for a sustainable green future
- AI in reducing the impacts of global warming
- Deep learning for sustainable earth surveillance and earth informatics
India’s AI Potential
- AI is expected to add US $967 billion to Indian economy by 2035 and US $450–500 billion to India’s GDP by 2025, accounting for 10 per cent of the country’s USD 5 trillion GDP target.
- It is pertinent to note that India has recently launched the National AI Strategy and National AI Portal.
- It has also started leveraging AI across various sectors such as education, agriculture, healthcare, e-commerce, finance, telecommunications, etc. with inclusion and empowerment of human being approach by supplementing growth and development.
- By joining GPAI as a founding member, India will actively participate in the global development of Artificial Intelligence, leveraging upon its experience around the use of digital technologies for inclusive growth.
Way forward
- Citizens should be brought to the table during the process of policymaking.
- It will open the door to collective intelligence.
- Also, there should be an effort from companies, ML practitioners and researchers.
- Finally, governments should take measures to revisit policies.
