New Delhi:
The advance of AI, or Artificial Intelligence, is inevitable, and will bring in “new kinds of jobs… new scales of jobs”, Amitabh Kant, India’s G20 Sherpa, said Tuesday night at the NDTV World Summit.
AI, Mr Kant also said, must be used to create a “better society (and) improve human development in place of creating LLMs”, referring to Large Language Models, which are a type of machine learning that can carry out natural language processing, or NLP, tasks.
“All this talk about AI is about LLMs… every day a new LLM. But AI should impact the lives of the citizens. So, you need AI for improving learning outcomes, health outcomes… you need it for improving nutritional standards… AI should be used to improve the quality of lives,” he said.
“AI should not be used just to create LLMs which could be in conflict tomorrow over ethical concerns because of assumptions on which they are based,” Mr Kant added, “Therefore it is very critical that we divert AI for transforming the lives of citizens.”
Asked if AI will take over existing jobs – a worrying scenario for critics of the technology – Mr Kant responded, “AI is inevitable… but it will bring in new kinds of jobs… and therefore we need to create many more skilled people in these areas (referring to data sciences, machine learning, etc.).”
“And that is what many of our IITs are doing today,” he said.
On the larger question of India’s economic development – specifically the target of becoming the world’s third-largest economy by 2030 – Mr Kant stressed the need for reskilling and taking advantage of the country’s younger demographic, as well as jumpstarting manufacturing.
“Growing from a $4 trillion to a $30 trillion economy means your GDP has to grow nine times… your per capita income eight times… and the manufacturing sector by 16 times. That is the challenge… and to overcome that India needs to become a key part of the (global) value chain,” he told NDTV.
