Opinion | Can India Create An 'AI City'?

My teenage daughter was recently watching an animated movie called Wild Robot. It depicted a scenario where a robot gets lost in a forest and must adapt to the ways of the jungle and its inhabitants. My daughter described the movie as being similar to The Jungle Book, except, instead of Mowgli, it featured a robot raised in the wild. This analogy got me thinking deeply. A few wise people, like Jeff Hinton, the 'Godfather of AI' and this year's Nobel Prize winner in physics, have been warning us about existential threats from AI. But we have so far ignored these warnings. Current foundation models are filled with unseen risks, yet they are being beta-tested on billions without much consideration for safety. Imagine a vaccine that, instead of going through lab animal and human trials, is released for mass consumption instantly and ends up being catastrophic. In the mad gold rush for AI gains, we are forgetting that we don't have a version control for Earth to fall back on.

Just a few days back, a few educated middle-class people in Bengaluru lost their life's earnings to deepfakes of "Mr. Mukesh Ambani" and "Mr. Narayana Murthy" promoting a fraudulent trading platform. The trust that these entrepreneurs have built in the public eye was misused to sell fake schemes. The internet is being flooded with countless stories of schoolboys sharing inappropriate images of peers and teachers. The psychological scarring that children will endure in their formative years is immense. As technology becomes more adept at cloning voices and faces, it will create even greater challenges for an ill-prepared society. News-driven deepfakes on X.AI probably did influence US elections, and we will see the impact only in the coming years as AI's reach widens, shaping the kind of leaders our world will get in the future, all in the name of free speech. Ironically, we don't even know what "free speech" means for AI agents.