Firstly, I would like to express my gratitude to Elet and Ravi Gupta for inviting me here, and to Mrs. Rajnish for making Bangalore so beautiful this morning. The weather gods have been very kind. Coming from Rajasthan, I am truly impressed by the city of Bangalore, which rightfully is the AI capital, the startup capital, and so many other things. Please pardon me if some things I speak about are already well known to you.
I am from IIT, so I understand technology, but over time, we have become practitioners. At a later stage, when we reflect back, most of the time what is happening is that what we thought and worked upon has already been done somewhere or done better. The speed of transformation is sometimes very awesome but sometimes very threatening.
I know we all have shifted to digital, as Mr. Gupta mentioned, but at my age, which is 50 plus, whenever I do a digital transaction and the next day I read that Mr. XYZ lost so much money through data fraud, I go back to my old system. I send my PA with my passbook and ask him to verify and get a printout so that I can confirm that my money has only been debited for the amount I paid.
Yesterday, I was roaming around the Orion Mall, which is very close, and I still wanted to pay cash until the guy said the bill is only 105 rupees. I said, "Take 200," but he said he didn't have 95 rupees change. So, very cautiously, I paid him 100 rupees and let him keep the change. I can afford to lose this much. This was a real transaction because I also wanted to try how BHIM is working and how other things are operating.
Sometimes, even in a gathering of IAS officers, you see a very standard norm: when four people in a family sit at a table, there are four mobiles operating simultaneously. My wife, my son, my daughter, and I, if you look at a common space, you'll see my wife, who is Chief Commissioner of Income Tax and will be speaking in the afternoon session, always sees those reels and ads of saris and jewelry. I either get an ad for a watch, some digital thing, or something funny. It makes you think. We all have been brought up in a very intelligent, thought-provoking kind of environment. We think there should be logic. But actually, what we feel is that somebody is watching us, seeing everything we do.
If you read Thomas Friedman, who says, "Thank God we are late," when you cross a road, do you see that the ads that come up are your favorite ads? Something has taken over, and we don't know it. It’s very innocuous, and the pace of change is not terrorizing; maybe threatening is the right word. Being from IIT, I try to keep pace, and I read. This is the law of exponentials, summed up in Moore's law. He discovered, you see, all laws are of two types: one is theoretical, like Newton's law, which says anything that goes up must come down. Then there are observational laws. Moore's law is one of those observational laws, which says that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years, and the cost reduces to half. This has been exponentially true about anything that went digital. Of course, this two years has either become one and a half years or one year, but it is difficult.
All of us
are trained to think linearly. So, suppose I give you a rough example that I found very useful in Pascal Finette's speech at Singularity University. Suppose the distance from where I am to the back of the room is 30 meters, and I take a step of 1 meter each. I will cross this in 30 linear steps. Now, suppose I make those steps exponential. The first step is 1 meter, the second is 2 meters, then 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and so on. How far will I reach in 30 exponential steps? Any guesses?
Would I reach the back of the room? Would I reach the U.S.? No guesses? The exact figure is 10,737,742 kilometers. I will reach the moon, which is 384,400 kilometers away, come back, and still have 244,000 kilometers more. I can go around the Earth 25 times, like the little Ganesha of Lord Shiva. This is because my mind has always been trained to think linearly, like 1 + 1, but never about the exponential growth like 1 + 2 raised to the power of 29. This is the pace at which change is happening, and it's mind-boggling.
I may be pardoned by Mr. Ravi Gupta for shifting the topic from the role of AI in transforming governance to the role of governments in transforming AI, because that is the larger issue. For 4 billion years of evolution, it was nature versus man. In the last 200 years, what people call the Anthropocene era, we took over nature, and it became man versus man. But in the last few years, AI has developed so much. We always thought about how we can use AI for our services. As long as it's providing utilities, it's fine. I used to stand in a queue at a railway station, but I haven't visited one to buy a ticket for ages. I don't even know where it is. Being an IAS officer, we didn't go to the electricity office to pay bills; we had peons. Now it's all mobile.
The major change has come with ChatGPT. Experts will have different opinions, but my understanding is that something major has changed. This is just the beginning. My favorite author, Yuval Noah Harari, who I am not quoting directly, suggests that there is something distinguishing man from AI. We've always said that AI will never be able to take over because it doesn't have consciousness or sentience. The second argument was the physical ability to live in environments like Mount Everest or our cities, but that is not a significant hurdle.
We always thought that unless AI develops consciousness, it will never be able to take over humanity. But recently, thinking has changed because with ChatGPT, AI has mastered the ability to understand and use language, not just in terms of words, but also images. It can write poetry, create art, and perform other tasks we considered uniquely human.
We created gods, human rights, and social systems. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the preferences we have, and the choices we make—whether political, religious, or otherwise—are all human creations. What happens if, slowly, non-humans take over? The difference is that AI has the ability to improve itself.
Consider chess. The day the best human mind was defeated by a computer, we could say with confidence that no human could defeat a computer in chess. The same might be said for other areas. Can AI understand human beings? Can it fake consciousness and manipulate the human mind? We live in a social illusion; nations and religions are creations of the human mind. If AI can imitate these realities to influence us, it has effectively taken over.
Instances like the Google's Lambda AI, which an engineer thought was sentient, highlight this potential. How much time will it take for AI to convincingly fake consciousness and influence human behavior? We all know "Maya" from Hindu scriptures, an illusion, and we are living in an illusion.
AI's ability to improve itself at an exponential rate is unimaginable. We may love the benefits of AI, but we should not allow it to control everything. This is not just a question for one government or corporation, but for all governments and corporations worldwide. They need to sit together and create a framework to regulate AI, ensuring that it doesn't surpass human oversight.
In 1945, when nuclear technology was developed, the world came together to regulate its use. Nuclear technology couldn't improve itself, unlike AI. This AI threat is insidious and slowly approaching. If not controlled at the right time, it may cross the threshold of control.
To conclude, governments and corporations need to work together to ensure AI remains under human oversight. Thank you so much for your patience. I may have rambled, but I hope I conveyed the urgency of this issue.
Let me end with a quote from the movie "Ex Machina," where Nathan talks about Ava: "One day, the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons in the plains of Africa: an upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction." Let us not let that day come.
Thank you again, Ravi Gupta, for inviting us, and thank you to the government of Karnataka, represented here by Mrs. Rajnish, for making this event so wonderful. Thank you. Source