The global partnership between Europe and India has the potential to become one of the most important global partnerships and play a role in creating a world that is more humane, economically better off and ecologically fairer. Addressing the challenges of a complex and digitally connected world is no longer possible without effective global cooperation. Recent months have been highly encouraging for the Europe-India partnership. If we want it to remain healthy and to be strengthened further, even better dialogue and joint problem-solving in the world must be ensured. Good relations between Europe and India, the two largest democracies, can be viewed as a hope that we are heading towards a better world.
Cooperation can be improved by focusing on areas essential for scientific and technological progress, which is why centres for joint education, knowledge exchange and excellent cultural exchange need to be set up and well-functioning. Such centres would be key to an effective conversation on strategic priorities and policy-making, which, because of similar values, are common to Europe and India.
It is for reasons such as these that the idea of the First Slovenian-Indian Day of Science and Innovation was conceived. This could be a small but significant start to such a partnership. It would be based on science, technology and innovation, and later on the excellent cooperation between two cultures that are very different, but both fascinating and rich.
This day cannot start without mentioning technology, which in the last two years has completely changed our world and our perception of the world, and is likely to be crucial for India’s progress and position in the future. Even those who are generally not that interested in science and technology must admit that they have at least picked up on some of this technology in the media.
In a well-known TV show called “60 Minutes Interview” by a global TV network, Englishman Geoffrey Hinton, nicknamed “Godfather of AI” and former Google employee, is asked at the beginning of the interview by the moderator: “Does mankind even know what it is doing in this field of science?” His answer is a brief “No!”, followed by the immediate assertion that, for the first time in history, we have “built” something that will very soon surpass us in intelligence. This thing that we have ‘built’ understands people and is intelligent, and not only that, but the technology that we have witnessed in the last year is said to be destined to bring about a greater disruption in our way of life than personal computers and even mobile phones did not too long ago.
Yuval Noah Harari, author of Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from Stone Age to AI, to be published this September, argues that there is a fundamental difference between technologies that have led to great advances in human history, such as the invention of the radio, the steam engine or the invention of the printing press. He says that this is the first technology in history that makes autonomous decisions and can generate new ideas on its own. The radio or the copying machine did not decide for themselves what to play or copy. People did that, and by operating such technology, they became more powerful. By deciding for itself where to send information, what song to write, or what ideology, political or religious, to create, AI has the potential to disempower humanity and thus overpower humans. Hence, it becomes a direct threat to people’s free will.
This January, leading representatives of companies in the digital industry were interviewed by Yahoo Finance. Bill Gates pointed out that AI can be used for cyber-attacks or to design the most lethal bioterrorist weapon ever. Whenever there is new technology of this nature, it can be used for something very good, like solving a major problem or, on the other hand, for actions with conflicting goals. And the biggest challenge in using AI will be to optimise the process to get the most useful results and almost completely stop the negative impact of artificial thinking. Adena Friedman, CEO of Nasdeq, has predicted a complete change in the economy in the near future, resulting from companies that are “AI driven”, “AI enabled” and even AI companies themselves. Every company in the market will benefit from new technology, but the major changes will come with the so-called “Generative AI”.
We all agree that any new technology needs to be regulated, especially one that is rumoured to be expected to yield such huge profits. The weapons industry and large private firms in particular can greatly twist the ethical view in their favour, thus allowing the ‘genie to get out of the bottle’. Still, it’s not all that scary. A study recently conducted and published by MIT has cleared up fears that AI technology would soon replace a large number of industrial jobs because of its huge potential. AI can cost-effectively replace only 29% of the current workforce. The current study shows that most job replacements will be in areas such as healthcare and retail, while the fewest will be in industries such as construction, mining and the real estate market.
Every year on 26 January, India celebrates Republic Day, a national holiday that marks the adoption of a new constitution in 1950, and this year, it is India’s 75th anniversary of becoming a sovereign republic. Despite stereotypes, India is today the most populous country and the second largest English-speaking country in the world. On the website of The Tatva, we can read that the importance of population in such a large country is not only in the number of people, but also in the structure of the population. India’s population average is 28 years, which is 10 years less than the average of the world’s second largest population, China. There are therefore hundreds of millions of Indians in this age category, which is the most important for the growth of the economy, and it is this Indian working population that will play a leading role in the global workforce in the near future. This is the population that contributes most to new ideas, new discoveries and the development of new technologies.
India’s large population and India’s strong digital ecosystem can generate a huge amount of useful data. And AI itself can carry out analyses and recommend the growth factors that we need to consider most for the best economic growth. So, at the moment, the biggest problem in the field of AI that India has yet to solve is precisely how to store and process so much data for quality studies and use outside the academic environment.
As early as 2019, India set out a comprehensive roadmap for the integration of AI in its National Strategy. In tackling the problems caused by the pandemic imposed on the economy, AI is likely to be a game changer, revolutionising both the economy and the way most companies in India do business. Given that India has more than 400 start-ups (approximately 60 unicorn companies, a lot of them in the technology sectors, including AI and IT), large number of them have emerged in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning, we can see that it is well on its way to becoming a global superpower in artificial intelligence.
What India’s future will look like developmentally, technologically and geopolitically depends largely on India itself. It certainly has a number of problems to solve before its power can be truly realised. How this would be done was well indicated by India’s successful chairmanship of the last G20 forum. The first signs of a prosperous future for India are already emerging. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently published a report which predicts that India will become the world’s second largest economy in terms of GDP growth, just behind China, as early as in 2050.
Andraž Ivšek
Ljubljana, 1 February 2024
The speech of the Coordinator of The first Slovenian-Indian Day of Science and Innovation.
In Scientia Veritas 