National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence

NITI Aayog has formulated a National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence. The policy focuses on how India can leverage the transformative technologies to ensure social and inclusive growth in India.

Objectives

  • Enhancing and empowering human capabilities to address the challenges of access, affordability, shortage and inconsistency of skilled expertise;
  • Effective implementation of AI initiatives to evolve scalable solutions for emerging economies; Endeavors to tackle some of the global challenges from AI’s perspective related to research, development, technology and responsible AI.
  • Harnessing collaborations and partnerships, and aspires to ensure prosperity for all. Thus, #AIforAll means technology leadership in AI for achieving the greater good.

Components

It’s a framework which is an aggregation of the following three distinct, yet inter-related components:

1. Opportunity: The Economic Impact of Artificial Intelligence for India

  • AI has the potential to overcome the physical limitations of capital and labour, and open up new sources of value and growth. From an economic impact perspective, AI has the potential to drive growth through enabling:
    • Intelligent Automation i.e. ability to automate complex physical world tasks that require adaptability and agility across industries,
    • Labor and Capital Augmentation enabling humans to focus on parts of their role that add the most value, complementing human capabilities and improving capital efficiency, and
    • Innovation diffusion i.e. launching innovations as it percolates through the economy.
  • AI innovations in one sector will have positive consequences in another, as industry sectors are interdependent based on value chain. Economic value is expected to be created from the new goods, services and innovations that AI will enable.
  • According to a report by Accenture, it is estimated that AI can boost India’s annual growth rate by 1.3 percentage points by 2035.

2. AI for Greater Good: Social Development and Inclusive Growth

  • AI is expected to have the transformative impact on the greater good – like improving the quality of life and access of choice to a large section of the country.
  • AI technology can be used in solving the pressing issues like:
    • Increased access to quality health facilities, inclusive financial growth for large sections of population which has hitherto been excluded from formal financial products.
    • Providing real-time advisory related to price, weather etc to farmers and help address unforeseen factors towards increasing productivity.
  • Building smart and efficient cities and infrastructure to meet the demands of rapidly urbanising population.

3. AI Garage for 40% of the World

  • India provides a perfect “playground” for enterprises and institutions globally to develop scalable solutions which can be easily implemented in the rest of the developing and emerging economies.
  • Eg. An advanced AI based solution for early diagnosis of tuberculosis (one of the top-10 causes of deaths worldwide), once developed and refined in India, could easily be extended to countries in South East Asia or Africa.
  • Another aspect of India’s potential as a leader in AI is its proven track record in technology solution provider of choice. Solved in India (or solved by Indian IT companies) could be the model going forward for Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS). Indian IT companies have been pioneers in bringing technology products and developments as solutions across the globe.
  • Furthermore, India’s competence in IT combined with opportunities, such as interoperability between multiple languages, provides the much needed impetus for finding scalable solutions for problems that have global implications.

Suggestions

  1. A two-tiered structure can address India’s AI research aspirations:
    1. Centre of Research Excellence (CORE) focused on developing better understanding of existingcore research and pushing technology frontiers through creation of new knowledge.
    2. International Centers of Transformational AI (ICTAI) with a mandate of developing and deployingapplication-basedresearch.PrivatesectorcollaborationisenvisionedtobeakeyaspectofICTAIs.
  2. Use Common Cloud computing platform AIRAWAT (AI Research, Analytics and knowledge Assimilation platform) for Big Data Analytics and Assimilation with AI Computing infrastructure.
  3. Pursue “moonshot” projects – ambitious explorations that aim to push the technology frontier to solve some of the biggest challenges.
  4. Develop a dedicated supranational agency “CERN for AI” to channel research in solving big, audacious problems of AI.
  5. Accelerate Skilling for AI across institutions and industries as AI will disrupt the nature of jobs and shift the benchmarks of technological aptitude.
  6. Accelerate the adoption of AI across the value chain through creating a multi-stakeholder National AI Marketplace (NAIM), partnerships and collaborations, spreading awareness on the advantages AI offers and supporting startups.
  7. For accelerated adoption of AI, the government should play the critical role of a catalyst in supporting partnerships, providing access to infrastructure, fostering innovation through research and creating the demand by seeking solutions for addressing various governmental needs.
  8. Establish a data protection framework with legal backing and sectoral regulatory frameworks for additional protection to user privacy and security.
  9. Benchmark national data protection and privacy laws with international standards and encourage self-regulation
  10. A consortium of Ethics Councils at each Centre of Research Excellence can be set up and it would be expected that all COREs adhere to standard practices while developing AI technology and products.
  11. To tackle the issues of Intellectual Property, establishment of IP facilitation centers to help bridge the gap between practitioners and AI developers, and adequate training of IP granting authorities, judiciary and tribunals is suggested.

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