Man and Superman: India’s Prospects in the Age of AI (Part 9)

And that brings me to the role of policy in general, and to AI policy in particular.

The problem the West is trying to get its arms around right now is how to design AI policy that doesn’t hinder the development of benevolent AI but does check the proliferation of destructive AI.

This is a very difficult problem to solve.

As I said earlier, AI is abundantly available right now, and expertise is being acquired rapidly and democratically. An online education platform called Udemy has some 8 million people learning AI programming as we speak.

Large platforms like Open AI, Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud are all building AI capabilities and easy to use programming tools to accelerate this democratization.

It is going to be very hard to control what people do with this capability.

In addition, people with superior AI knowledge do not work for governments. Governments have very low levels of understanding of AI in general, and thus they cannot really figure out how to design policy.

AI is moving extraordinarily fast, so the policy level interventions need to happen fairly quickly.

But all governments are on shaky ground on this subject.

In addition, governments also need offensive and defensive AI to manage defense and Homeland security. There too, hiring the best engineers is not easy for governments. The private sector pays exorbitant sums to good engineers. Governments cannot compete with them.

Another issue is that different governments will deal with AI policy differently. Some will be really aggressive. Some will be more measured. 

For example, once AI augmentation of humans becomes feasible, an autocratic government could create aggressive policies to force full population augmentation.

A more moderate democratic government would go more slowly, give more freedom of choice, and as such, could end up falling behind in the race to survive.

All this is going to be extremely messy.

This segment is part 9 in the series : Man and Superman: India's Prospects in the Age of AI
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10