Palanivel Thiaga Rajan, Tamil Nadu’s Minister for Information Technology and Digital Services, said on Thursday that artificial intelligence (AI) is “augmentative technology rather than a replacement for human capital.” In his valedictory address at The Hindu AI Summit 2024, he said:

“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.” The Minister said that the volume of data collected, stored and available for analysis is “mind bog gling”. “The first PC 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 generated every day.”

Mr. Thiyagarajan said that earlier, data was manually entered into a 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 that 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 centers that can store that kind of data.” He added the shift towards automation and processing was inevitable. “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.” He said the ultimate benefit of AI would be to address problems in governance. “Across the world, all governments had under invested in infrastructure, processing capability and cybersecurity. He said job replacements would happen, but not immediately. “We have time and all of us collectively  the government, industry, academia, global companies, and innovators  will find a way to see this as an inflection point, not just in technology, but in our economic activity,” he added.

 

Media: The Hindu