Artificial Intelligence-India

• Artificial intelligence (AI), sometimes called machine intelligence, is intelligence demonstrated by machines.
• Industrial revolution moved the centres of physical power from human and animal bodies to machines. With the locus of intelligence now also getting disembodied, AI systems are set to transform our economic, social and political organisation.
• Unlike most industrial technologies, AI does not develop in laboratories and then get applied by businesses. AI develops within business processes, as data are mined from digital platforms, and turned into intelligence, which is ploughed back to produce more data and intelligence, in infinite loops. Any country’s AI therefore largely exists within its huge, domestically owned commercial digital/data systems.
• India has no such large domestically owned commercial data systems. And any chance that these could develop is being nipped by allowing takeovers like of Flipkart by Walmart. 
• In time, such AI will allow them to control practically everything, and every actor, along various economic value chains linked to consumer goods.
• Beyond economic dominance, AI is as much about cultural, political and military power.
• A big nation like India cannot derive satisfaction from rapidly becoming a client country for AI, whether as ready users of AI applications in different areas, or by offering outsourced R&D for global digital/AI corporations through start-ups existentially eager to be bought out. 
• Technologies should flow freely across the globe, and we must welcome global technology companies to help India’s digital development..

There is no other route but to become an AI superpower for India with its highest IT as well as entrepreneurial or managerial competence, and a huge domestic market, India is among extremely few countries that can make it.

Source: The Hindu