Are we prepared for the AI juggernaut?

 

Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/blue-bright-lights-373543/

Rising unemployment amongst Indian youth is one of the biggest challenges facing the nation and things have been compounded by the emergence of AI or Artificial Intelligence as an enabler of efficiency and cost reduction for businesses and organisations across the board.  According to an All India Management Association-PWC report 46% of decision makers/influencers believed that AI systems would severely impact the Indian employment scenario.[1]

But are Indian businesses really going all out to adopt AI, as all the hype surrounding its imminent dominance of all manner of industries would seem to suggest? Apparently not according to the Cisco 2024 readiness index which found that only 18% of Indian organisations are ready to comprehensively deploy AI, which is down from a more robust 26% merely a year ago.[2] While this may ring alarm bells among AI votaries in India about the country’s preparedness with regard to the coming AI blitzkrieg, it is also a sobering indicator about the fact that AI like any another technology will have to go beyond mere media build-up to actually show big bang for the buck for everyone to succumb 100% to its unproven charms.

Before we debate the efficacy of AI in industrial, business, social and practically every type of organization that exists in the world, we have to understand that the emergence of the technology is on account of the same free-wheeling capitalism that is leading to climate catastrophe threatening to end life as we know it on planet Earth. Ruthless and heartless efficiency are at the heart of AI technology with scant regard for the human beings who created these organisations for their own purposes. By prioritising organisations over human beings, AI may be striking at the root of human existence.

This is a philosophical question that needs answering, especially in a country like India with its still teeming millions, vast numbers of whom do not possess the skills that will gainfully employ them. If we think that unbridled AI is a necessary evil, as indeed more and more people believe that unbridled capitalism is proving to be, shouldn’t there be stringent regulation of it, much as there is of corporate organizations striving to become absolute monopolies?

AI has undoubtedly become the investors' and entrepreneurs' blue-eyed boy for want of a better expression for the almost colonialist attitude towards expecting untold riches to accrue to them in a trans-global AI paradise where only the gatekeepers of new-fangled technologies and their capitalist backers will find utopia, never mind the aspirations of the billions of other underprivileged souls. Already there is talk of the latter being mollified by a Universal Basic Income! 1984 and Matrix anyone.

To those who tout AI as the definitive technology that will help transform healthcare, the environment sector, education and everything else on God’s good Earth, it pays to remember that according to a report in The New Yorker, if Google decides to integrate Generative AI into every search that ever took place, the consequent power consumption would be 29 billion K Wh annually -more than what many small nations consume.[3] Just what the doctor ordered for a sick and climate-change-afflicted world!

In fact, the very debate about the AI revolution delivering the world seems far-fetched and facetious in a world wracked by wars, epidemics, catastrophic floods, forest fires, multiple refugee crises, impending trade wars ethnic conflicts and global trade wars. Viewed against what’s going on in this world of ours at any given time, any fiery debate about how AI promises to transform the world is a bit of a joke. The human condition may have improved since the days of cave dwellers, but only that much. Human nature has so far ensured that there is no inexorable march towards utopia or nirvana that ensures peaceful and happy coexistence for all. AI promises to step up to the chase and help us achieve just that. We shall see.

 

 

 

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[1] https://www.pwc.in/assets/pdfs/publications/2018/how-ai-is-reshaping-jobs-in-india.pdf

[2] https://www.theweek.in/news/sci-tech/2024/11/12/ai-readiness-declines-in-india-only-18-firms-fully-prepared-to-deploy-ai-powered-technologies.html

[3] https://www.expresscomputer.in/artificial-intelligence-ai/ai-ai-everywhere-but-are-we-truly-prepared/116699/