AI is augmentative technology rather than a replacement: Palanivel Thiaga Rajan

India's Minister for Information Technology discusses the importance of AI and data in shaping the country's future.

“Artificial Intelligence (AI) is augmentative technology rather than a replacement for human capital. This is a vital period in our evolution as a country where, now and for the next 20 years, India will be the largest source of working-age human capital in the world. This is our chance to take AI as a wonderful opportunity rather than to see it as a threat,” Palanivel Thiaga Rajan, Minister for Information Technology and Digital Services, said here on Thursday.

In his valedictory address at the summit, he said: “The volume of data collected, stored, and available for analysis is mind-boggling. It has grown exponentially.” He added, “The first PC [personal computer] that I had in my house in Madurai in 1981, had a RAM of 64 kilobytes and a hard drive of 20 megabytes. Today, we have run out of zeros to talk about the amount of data being generated every day, and the average phone has hundreds of gigabytes or even one or two terabytes. The amount of data that can be stored has just gone through the roof, and the way it is collected has changed dramatically.”

Mr. Thiaga Rajan said that earlier, data was manually entered into the computer. “Now, we have data that nobody has ever touched, coming in at such high volumes. This lends itself to the notion that we don’t need a human being in between. The collection and storage is automatic. The algorithms will process the data, and the results will come without any human being having touched it. So, data is the first big thing that has changed.”

He said we had moved past traditional notions of data and have taken a more inclusive approach, especially in the case of voice data, which according to him would be a game changer in India. “If you have a huge volume of data and a large amount of processing capability, the physical infrastructure becomes the bottleneck. The first question is do we have data centres that can store that kind of data.”

The Minister said: “A lot of data centres and hyper-scalers have commitments to being relatively green or 100% carbon neutral in the very near term. So, the availability of green energy at a reasonable distance, and being able to use it, makes a big difference.”

He added that the shift towards more and more automation and processing was inevitable. “But, I don’t think it is growing exponentially fast. We have seen dramatic cutting-edge developments in the last couple of years. But at this point, technology still is augmentative. We can see so many flaws, and limitations in technology. It will take time for us to clean all this data and use it effectively.”

Since the DMK came to power, it has integrated data sets that have never been used before, Mr. Thiaga Rajan said. “When we introduced the Puthumai Penn Scheme, a scholarship programme for girl students from government schools who want to pursue higher education, we had to program and analyse data for the first time because we had never integrated such data before. When the scheme was expanded to boys in the form of Tamil Pudhalvan, the process was almost straightforward.”