Should India Have A Sound Ai-policy?

Asoke K Laha, President & MD, Interra Information Technologies

A proactive governance structure should look at the changes that will happen in the future and delineate prospects and challenges the changes can bring into operation. I was privy to a discussion amongst experts of highly recognized credentials about the employment prospects of the future generation, whether those who seek employment will be able to get them, what type of qualifications the future generations should possess to get employed, what type of policies to be followed to ensure sustainable employment when technology is increasingly replacing the role of human beings and a host of issues that might envelop the future generation. The upshot of the discussion was the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its impact on human beings and the tectonic civilizational change it can script on future generations.

A few scenarios highlighted by the experts are worth noting. Foremost is the loss of employment to human beings when automation is carried out. Enterprises that employ several millions of people like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft etc. can do with a few hundred people when automation fully takes place.

In developed countries where low growth of population is a reality and greying number of people form the bulk of the population, introduction of AI in a large scale is a desirable option. Automation has a distinct advantage for such countries since some of the developed countries are averse to the immigration of people. What about countries in the emerging and developing bloc, which face severe unemployment backlog if AI is introduced? How will they grapple with the unemployment issue? It is a fact that several jobs can be replaced with AI. We have seen how call centers and customer care centers have mostly become irrelevant with the introduction of chatbots and similar types of devices that can replace humans in managing things. Many enterprises in the West are doing away with excess workforce because of automation. Through a system of command and direction leveraging AI application, many of the works can be replaced with machines since machine language will be increasingly used from now.

I do not know how many would have taken cognizance of a development that had taken place in December 2023 in the European Union. The EU Commission welcomed the political agreement reached between the European Parliament and the Council on the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act). The Act was proposed by the EU Commission in April 2021.

At a meeting chaired by its President Ursula von der Leyen, EU Commission said that Artificial intelligence was already changing everyday lives. The process, she underscored, has just started and acknowledged huge benefits to the economy and society. She said that the Act should be human centric and its rules and principles should be woven to suit the mankind and not to create pain points.

The EU's AI Act is the first-ever comprehensive legal framework on Artificial Intelligence worldwide. By focusing regulation on identifiable risks, the agreement will foster responsible innovation in Europe. By guaranteeing the safety and fundamental rights of people and businesses, it will support the development, deployment and take-up of trustworthy AI in the EU.

The Commission’s consensual approach to AI is a process stretching back to few years. It has been debating on a AI regime based on trust and consensus trust based on EU values. That exercise started in 2018 to evolve a European Strategy on AI. After extensive stakeholder consultation, the High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (HLEG) developed a set of guidelines on 2019 lines and an Assessment List for Trustworthy AI in 2020.

The compliance norms suggested by the Act should be discerned. It has identified high-risk areas that should strictly comply with requirements, including risk-mitigation systems, high-quality of data sets, logging of activity, detailed documentation, clear user information, human oversight, and a high level of robustness and accuracy. It has also laid emphasis on regulatory sandboxes that will facilitate responsible innovation and the development of compliant AI systems. The Act also set out examples of high-risk AI systems, which include certain critical infrastructures for instance in the fields of water, gas, electricity, medical devices; systems to determine access to educational institutions or for recruiting people; or certain systems used in the fields of law enforcements, biometric identification, and emotion recognition systems.

Importantly, the Act clearly says that AI systems considered a threat to the fundamental rights of people should be banned. This includes AI systems or applications that manipulate human behavior to circumvent users' free will, such as toys using voice assistance to encourage dangerous behavior of minors or systems that allow ‘social scoring' by governments or companies and certain applications of predictive policing. 

In addition, some uses of biometric systems will be prohibited, for example, emotion recognition systems used at the workplace and some systems for categorizing people or real-time remote biometric identification for law enforcement purposes in publicly accessible spaces.

Companies not complying with the rules will be fined. Fines would range from €35 million or 7% of global annual turnover (whichever is higher) for violations of banned AI applications, €15 million or 3% for violations of other obligations and €7.5 million or 1.5% for supplying incorrect information. More proportionate caps are foreseen for administrative fines for SMEs and start-ups in case of infringements of the AI Act. I feel EU Act on AI is only the beginning. To be in line with this fundamental effort to regulate the application of AI, other countries will have to have a regulatory system sensitive to their countries and enterprises to promote the harmonious growth of AI.

Coming specifically to Indian conditions, I have a nagging feeling that though we are the third largest country in terms of the progress of our ICT systems, we are still a backbencher as far as debate and discourse on AI. The sooner we trigger an informed debate the better since India will be a strong stakeholder in the ecosystem that surrounds AI.