As the second AI Action Forum, co-chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, concluded in Paris, think tanks, policymakers, academia and civil society have started discussing ways to take advantage of the dawning AI age. Experts point out that innovation in AI needs to solve the problems of the last person in the societal strata.
At a colloquium organised by the Society to Harmonise Aspirations for Responsible Engagement (SHARE) in Assam, R. K. Mathur, former lieutenant governor of Ladakh and former defence secretary, highlighted the need for an AI revolution at grassroots level, for India to top this global AI race.
Mathur encouraged focus on the six-point resolutions passed in the AI Action Summit and draw policy guidance from it to solve hyperlocal challenges through artificial intelligence. He urged policymakers to identify such problems and collaborate with the technocrats to resolve them. One such area of intervention would be agriculture, he said.
Pointing out the great equalizing impacts of artificial intelligence, Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta, former DGP of Assam said, policymakers, experts and technocrats must take heart from what DeepSeek has done. Mahanta was highlighting how a low-cost model with a small team of young professionals disrupted the AI industry, leading to one of the biggest market losses for the major AI and allied companies of the west. “It is the most pertinent example of how innovation and talent could trump resources,” he said.
Industry leaders like KPMG, represented by Shubham Arora, highlighted several use cases of AI-enabled solutions with mass-level impact. At the same time, SHARE released a report titled ‘Evolving Landscape of Tech-Terror Nexus and Response Options for Global South,’ focusing on terror groups using emerging technologies to outplay global security.
As per a study by ‘Tech Against Terrorism' in November 2023’, cited in the SHARE report, showed how AI is leveraged by terror outfits like Al-Qaeda and Daesh as well as other extremist groups. Using open source tools (CAMeL, PyArabic, Bhashini, etc.) available for free, these groups are able to scale their propaganda both vertically and horizontally.
From recruitment to radicalization and covert communication, open source tools like Conversations, SilentCircle, Redphone and Signal play a critical role for these threat actors, says the report. The report also raises concern that unlike global north, in global south, efforts to tackle terror networks are often marred by resource constraints faced by law enforcement agencies.
For instance, the US 2024 internal security budget was estimated to be $65.9 billion, while India's was $25.8 billion. Countries like Thailand, Mexico, Egypt, Brazil, Indonesia, Argentina and South Africa allocated much less for their internal security. Using the same tools and repurposing them for counter-terror purposes, the report stresses how the agencies could outplay the threat actors, with much lower resources.
