27 Aug Artificial Intelligence for Nation Building

As per the Genesis account of the creation of human beings, God created man and woman in His own image. This unique identification of human beings as created in God’s image gives them few unique capabilities like God e.g. free will, creativity and innovation. With the creation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the 20th century and rapid advancements in 21st century, humans are again confronted with many of those dilemmas that shaped the future of humanity subsequent to the fall. Is AI good? Is AI bad? Should AI be allowed to make decisions which historically only humans have made? Is AI for everyone or a privileged few? Should AI research be banned or put on hold? Who governs AI? Should AI be regulated? Should AI be trusted? Is AI fair? Will AI take away our jobs? Is AI accelerating Climate Change? Are we living in a constant threat of AI take-over? And so on.

In this article, our aim is to highlight some of the AI technologies and applications which would be instrumental in nation building, preparing India for addressing the 21st century and future challenges of national and international scales, like enhancing industrial/human capital productivity, healthcare, education, transportation, drug and material discovery, industry 4.0/5.0, climate change, cybersecurity, maintaining law and order, predictive maintenance, customer service, and space exploration, etc.

To reap the benefits of deploying AI at scale, NITI Aayog, under the Government of India, published a strategy document titled ‘National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence’ in 2018. Since the publication of the above document, the Central Government and various State Governments have come up with numerous schemes to promote the adoption of AI in various government initiatives and programmes. In October 2023, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) released the first edition of IndiaAI report by seven expert working groups that were constituted to build the core goals of the ambitious India AI programme. This comprehensive 174-pages report lays out what will be the fulcrum of the IndiaAI strategy that was envisaged by the Indian Government. The seven areas covered by the expert working groups are: (1) IndiaAI Center of Excellence (CoE), (2) India Dataset Platform, (3) Institutional Capacity and Design of National Data Management Office, (4) IndiaAI Future Design, (5) IndiaAI FutureSkills, (6) IndiaAI Future Labs Compute and (7) Semicon IndiaAI Chipsets.

Before we proceed further on our exploration of AI technologies and applications, in today’s context when we talk of AI, we are often talking about an advanced Machine Learning (ML) technology. Machine Learning is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalize to new input data, and thus perform tasks without explicit instructions. Deep Learning (DL), a subset of machine learning, has seen unprecedented advancement after the first decade of the 21st century after experiencing many AI winters in the past. These advancements were due to many factors that worked together to bring the current deep learning revolution. First, there were great algorithmic advancements in using deep learning for computer vision and natural language processing tasks due to a new wave of academic and technological research interests in these areas. In the hardware domain, the availability of application-specific computing technologies like Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) resulted in successful trainings of large multi-layer deep neural networks which were not feasible in the past. The deep learning algorithms require vast amount of data for training which were readily available due to internet, social-media and large healthcare record databases. Finally, the funding in startups and academia by mega tech companies, mostly in the Silicon Valley, and many government agencies in America and Europe paved the way for the present AI revolution. This trend is likely to be strengthened by the open-source releases of many of the large language models, e.g. llama by Meta. Interested readers can refer to Gartner AI Hype Cycle and other similar public information to ascertain the scale of the current AI revolution.

One of the most promising areas of AI applications towards nation building that has seen great advancements in recent years is definitely the healthcare sector. India has a large rural population that has limited access to qualified or expert medical professionals. In such a case, empowering rural healthcare providers with capabilities of initial screening for some diseases like cancer or Alzheimer’s through AI powered health-tech applications would be a great boost towards providing quality healthcare for all citizens of India. Not only can AI detect abnormalities in medical scans like X-Rays or CT scans, it can also analyze blood samples to detect biomarkers. One startup in India is working on early detection of breast cancer using AI-based thermal image scanning as against using the mammography, which is an expensive method and requires radiology experts. When anonymized medical data would be made available for research and other applications through initiatives like National Health Portal and smart health devices like Apple watch, efforts for applying AI for Indian healthcare solutions would be greatly benefitted as without adequate training data, AI systems simply cannot produce reliable results.

It would not be a surprise for most of us that a large section of school and college students of our country do not have access to quality education and education resources. Here AI comes as a promising candidate for providing high quality and personalized education for students at all levels. This is specifically useful for students with special needs where there is a great scarcity of qualified teachers or other teaching/skilled professionals. In principle, it is possible to have a personalized AI teacher for every student. However, considering the practical side of the same, most students and colleges can be equipped with AI tutors or AI powered educational resources. Using ChatGPT for meeting the quality educational needs of students in rural areas or under-privileged sections of society is one such example. However, the adoption of AI in school and college education in India is at a quite preliminary stage and the long-term results of such adoption of AI powered tutors or resources in students are yet to be assessed. Recently, a school in Kerala has taken a revolutionary step in education with the introduction of AI teacher, Iris.

The application of AI in the areas like optimization of transportation network at a scale like FMCG, shipping, etc. is an active area of research. This can have a large impact in improving our GDP. AI has also been successfully demonstrated to provide accurate weather forecasting, e.g, Deepmind GraphCast, an AI model for faster and more accurate global weather forecasting. An accurate short-term and long-term weather prediction can help save our nation billions of rupees wasted each year due to drought, flooding, cyclones, tsunamis, and other weather-related calamities. AI is also revolutionizing drug discovery by shortening the drug discovery life-cycle or by inventing/proposing completely new drugs not conceived by human minds. Our country can leverage AI for research in those India specific diseases which are not addressed by developed nations or rare diseases specific to Indian subcontinent like acute encephalitis syndrome that has resulted in death of hundreds of children in India in the past few years but a medicine or antidote is yet to be made available. AI can also be used towards achieving India’s sustainability goal of becoming carbon neutral or net zero by 2070. Applying AI in making industrial processes and transportation sector more energy efficient and sustainable will accelerate our journey towards carbon neutrality and help us achieve it much earlier than the current target of 2070. AI can also help us to achieve United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs). The credit for successful moon landing of Chandrayaan 3 also in part goes to AI as the Automatic Landing Sequence (ALS), a critical part of the Chandrayaan-3 landing process, was powered by AI.

To summarize, AI has practically endless applications towards nation building. We as children of God and responsible Indian citizens can contribute greatly towards this cause by mastering AI and becoming exemplary leaders in this field. AI gives us power to provide business insights and scientific breakthroughs like those provided by exemplary children of God, Joseph and Daniel, in their context as recorded in the Bible. Now is the right time to learn AI technologies in order to take stock of this rapidly developing field and harness early adopters’ advantage. There are plenty of high quality free and paid educational resources available as learning apps and websites to make a career in AI. Further, the domain of Responsible AI provides a gateway for humanities students to foray into the domain of AI. Let each one of us resolve to meaningfully contribute towards building our nation to achieve greater economic and humanitarian milestones. With AI, definitely we can.

Bhagirath Kumar Lader is a member of EGF in Noida, UP, and is employed by a public sector undertaking. He holds a degree in Computer Science from IIT Delhi. With 20 years of experience in the IT industry, he is passionate about utilizing new generation disruptive technologies such as AI, Blockchain, IoT, Cloud Computing, RPA, and Quantum Computing for nation building. His LinkedIn profile can be found at www.linkedin.com/in/bhagirathl, and he can be contacted via email at ai79bh@gmail.com.