Simplifying Daily Routines: Virtual assistants (like Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant) use AI to manage calendars, set reminders, answer questions, and control smart home devices through voice commands.
Personalized Experiences: AI powers recommendation systems on streaming platforms, online stores, and social media, suggesting movies, music, products, and content tailored to individual preferences based on past interactions and behavior.
Enhancing Communication: AI-powered tools assist with email filtering and organization, chatbot support on websites, and real-time language translation, breaking down communication barriers and improving online interactions.
Improving Navigation and Transportation: Apps like Google Maps utilize AI for real-time traffic updates, route optimization, and predicting arrival times, helping individuals navigate more efficiently and avoid congestion.
Boosting Healthcare Access and Management: AI contributes to personalized health monitoring through wearable devices, telemedicine platforms for remote consultations, and AI-powered diagnostic tools to assist medical professionals, potentially leading to earlier detection and tailored treatments.
Enhancing Accessibility: AI plays a crucial role in improving web accessibility for individuals with disabilities, offering tools like speech recognition for voice commands, automatic captions for videos, image descriptions for visually impaired users, and adapting content for different learning styles.
Improving Security: AI enhances cyber security by detecting threats, identifying suspicious activity, and offering personalized security recommendations to protect personal information and digital devices. As AI continues to evolve, its applications are expected to expand further, leading to even more seamless and intuitive interactions with technology in our daily lives.
How AI is shaping the destiny of the planet? I come from a very different background and as a result I bring in a very different perspective and I hope in the time I am given I'll be able to communicate my concern as a technocrat, policy maker and a concerned citizen.
I will spend some time on three main issues.And what has been the journey of AI? Then I'll spend some time on the state of the world today. What are the problems that we need to solve? Do we really need to solve all the problems they are solving today or do we have different sets of problems to solve? And then I will give you my perspective as to what is the real challenge which is very different from what Silicon Valley is doing which is very different from all the glamour and glitz we see around.
To me the world is focused on two things. profit and power. The rich and powerful have come together. In the process,they are ignoring the planet and people.So, how do we make this major shift? So we could begin to think of using AI not for profit necessarily and not for power but for the planet and people. It is a very complex task, believe me because I deal with many of these people from all over the world.
I'm 83 years old and I have spent 60 years in IT and telecom. So let me first start with AI. What does it mean to me?So we are at the age of profound transformation.It is more like electricity, car,telecom, internet, smartphone and even bigger than all of these put together. This is going to define the future of our planet in the next 25 years.
AI is about transforming information into actionable knowledge. I'll give you a simple example. Take a book. You read a book. You summarize in your mind. You remember a few things. Then you read another book. But AI will read a million books at the same time for you in 5 seconds and give you a summary. This is something unthinkable. Every bit of literature that is available on the internet can be read, analyzed, and evaluated,summarized and put into very simple advice.
So all I need to know is the questions I need to ask. Am I asking the right questions? If I ask the wrong question,I get the wrong information.Or is the information coming from the right data? If the data is wrong, the answer is wrong. So you can search the whole universe and do things because AI can read,write, analyze, paint, draw, and speak.
AI can do everything. It is no longer science fiction. It is real. It is here and it is accelerating very fast.
The journey for AI for me started in the late 50s when I was in college.We used to work with vacuum tubes. Then came the transistor.That was the seed that really transformed human civilization.From transistors came ultimately microprocessors, memories, software, operating systems, applications for banking, governance.Then came laptops, smartphones, internet, clouds.All of these things coming together really makes AI a possibility.
AI is not something in isolation. It has essentially taken 60 years for AI to be what it is today. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to travel through this path. I was there when Intel was formed as a company. I was there when the first 4-bit microprocessor was designed. I was the one who used a 4-bit microprocessor for the first time in telecom.So I have seen it, felt it, lived it and I know the power of AI to change humanity.
But I'm very worried. I'm very worried that the whole direction is being managed by the rich and powerful. Nobody pays attention to me because I'm not a billionaire. Nobody pays attention to people like us because we don't distribute favors. So today I'm going to take you through a different thought process. At the end of the day to me the AI question boils down to what do we value? Do we value humanity? Do we value the environment? Do we value democracy?And I'll talk a little bit about that later on.
So to understand AI, I need to understand the state of the world today.But before I go here, let me give you two examples of AI.When we have self-driving cars a reality in the next four, five years,first of all, I won't need to own a car. I won't need a garage.I don't need parking space, no driver's license, no insurance. I don't need to produce 50 million cars a year because 90% of the time the car is parked. The average car is parked 90% f the time. So I really need one10th of the car. So if I'm producing 50 million cars, I really need to produce 5 million cars a year. What does it mean to global economy to jobs you don't need traffic lights anymore? Can you imagine the millions of traffic lights in the world? Look at the amount of energy traffic lights take. You don't need traffic lights. You don't need direction.
The other day I was on Chad GPT and I asked Chad GPT what is the truth score of Sam Petroda? The answer came back and said 75. So I said let me ask about the truth score of Trump came back with 30. I said how the Dalai Lama came back with 95.How about Obama 70. I mean look at this. This machine is telling you all kinds of things that you can never even imagine.
The power of AI depends on how we want to structure it. So when I look at the state of the world today, I worry about our world. I worry about our world because we still have poverty, hunger, violence, name it, drugs, wars,environmental blunders.
To understand this, you need to go back to World War II. In World War II, a group of people decided to design the world. Three people in America really put together a plan to create the UN, World Bank, IMF, WH, ultimately WTO. That design remained intact for 80 years. Nobody ever questions that the World Bank always has a president from America. No one ever questions that the IMF always has a president from Europe.The idea was to control the financial system and military. That design worked well because then the world was in ruin. Japan had to be rebuilt.Europe had to be rebuilt. Everybody bought in. In the last 80 years.We have not created one new global institution of that order.
This design is basically obsolete and not many people are willing to accept that the UN doesn't work. You see all the wars going on. What is the role of the UN? Nobody knows. This design was based on democracy,human rights, capitalism, consumption and the military. Democracy is not inclusive. In America, we have black lives matters.In India, we have a caste system.Human rights are not good enough.
Now, you can produce anything. The question is what is that you want to produce and for whom do you want to produce? So you need to focus on human needs. Capitalism hasn't really delivered to everybody. Capitalism is great but it has concentrated wealth in the hands of very few. And AI is going to change that. It will increase substantially.Today you think 10 people control the wealth, tomorrow it will be two people. If this journey continues,then consumption is not good enough.
We need to learn to conserve. We need to think of nonviolence. All of these ideas are not on the table when you talk about AI. So what is the real global challenge for AI? The first thing is to really understand and appreciate the potential of AI. AI does have an opportunity to take humanity to the next level. Unfortunately, the best brains in the world are busy solving problems of the rich who really don't have problems to solve. And as a result, problems of the poor don't get the right kind of attention.What we need is political will,leadership and domain expertise to solve new sets of problems.
It is not about what we can do with AI to improve productivity, efficiency, reduce cost, come up with fancy products, and have a little glamour. It's not about doing better and bigger and doing it more efficiently. It's really about doing things we have never done before.We don't know what that is. We know how to improve productivity, efficiency, and reduce cost.The key is how do I use AI to transform governance, communities, relationship, character. There are a lot of bad players in this world and bad players really mess up everything. How do I create better human beings with AI?
Just ask your grandchildren. I have three grandkids.They understand AI. And if you ask them what do you want, they'll tell you. They don't want fights. They don't want hate. They don't want an enemy. They want friends.
We talk about transforming education with AI. What does it really mean? Is it about $250 for an MBA or is it about making a 16 year old self-earner so you don't have to go to college? The whole idea of a four year degree to get a BS and two years to get a master's is something I want to question. I don't need that anymore. Make me a self-earner and then I will ask all the questions to AI to get the answers I need.
Today's teacher is totally obsolete. I need a mentor. But teachers are not trained to be mentors. Can AI be used to train teachers to be a mentor? So everything has to be rethought through health.
When we talk about AI and health, everybody talks about cancer and radiology and all that. No, wrong path.Can you teach me how to take charge of my own health?
That's what AI is for. AI is to change the paradigm. AI is not about keeping the same paradigm and doing all these fancy things. AI is not about command and control. AI is about collaboration, cooperation, co-creation, communication. But we are not paying attention to these things. You will never hear these things in AI presentations. I can assure you what is happening.
So AI is definitely a global challenge. So I want to give you 10 steps.
First, we need a global, national and regional strategy with a clear commitment to move away from profit and power to the planet and people.
Global strategy is not good enough.You need local content, local database. AI is of no value if you don't have your own database.
Give you an example. Hindi is the third largest language in the world. It has 4% content on the internet.So when you look at AI the answers you are going to get for Hindi people are from the US and Europe. They don't have data to answer their questions. It's a very serious problem.No one wants to talk about it.
Then we need to first decide what we value? Do we value democracy, nonviolence, diversity, inclusion,sustainability, morals, ethics, honesty, openness? AI should be programmed to do all these things.
If you don't program AI for all of these values, a bunch of rich guys are going to program it for different values.As a result, inequality will increase.
Lots of people will have nothing to do and very few people will be very busy.
I want to use AI to build the judiciary in India. We have 50 million court cases pending. 50 million takes 15 years to get justice. Can I use AI to make sure that I can get justice in 12 months? Nobody's talking. It is never on the table.
How do I transform universities so I don't have to pay $200,000 to get an MBA? I want to pay $200, maybe $2,000. AI will do that for you.I have already designed a MBA program using AI and hopefully next year or so I want to offer it for $500, $1,000 to poor people, small companies. You don't need all these expensive sorts of Harvard MBAs anymore. They have a place. I'm not undermining that. But you have to make it accessible to a large number of people and don't have this elite mindset.
I want to use AI for civil society. I want to use AI to make the media fair and free. I want to really use AI to design myself. Nobody teaches me how to build a good self. How do you build a good self? Self that is respectful. Self that is fair, open, honest. How do you do that? I was born in India and grew up in Gandhian values. My father had a fourth grade education. I came to America 60 years ago in a boat.I understand the value of poverty. I understand the value of family. And when I see AI leaving that entire sector of humanity wide open, it bothers me. I want to focus on basic needs. Can AI change food, shelter, environment, employment? Can AI worry about water, power, mobility?
Then I want to worry about business, finance, productivity, manufacturing.
