Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy shared his views on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the landscape of IT services admitting the potential dangers, particularly in circumstances involving using AI for warfare or creating deepfakes.
“Artificial intelligence is all about augmenting the capacity of human mind to take on and solve problems that we could not have done earlier. So, it’s a very welcome technology. But in artificial intelligence itself, whether it is ChatGPT-4 or whether it’s supervised algorithmic thinking. Algorithms, whether it’s unsupervised algorithms or semi-supervised, whatever it is, you need lot of data. You need to collect lot of data. Because at the end of the day, machine learning by and large is a very complex piece of pattern matching,” he told Moneycontrol.
Murthy pointed out that our first task would be to move from an oral culture to a written culture, to a documentation-oriented culture, so that huge amounts of data can be generated.
“Otherwise what will happen is we will use all the data of the developed nations and we may come to wrong conclusions here. Because this is a different nation, this is at a different level of development. Our culture is different. Our heritage is different. Therefore, we must collect a large amount of data that is relevant to India and then only you can use all these models,” Murthy stated.
Murthy highlighted that humans need to use AI more as an augmentative tool rather than as a replacement tool.
“As long as we use AI as a tool to aid human beings to do bigger things, to do more complex things, I think we will start solving more complex problems. And that’s when the world will become a better place. So, I don’t see them as dangerous to humanity. However, having said that, in certain areas, for example, if you plan to attack some other nation and if you use AI there, yes, that is an issue. If you are given a nuclear bomb or something, and if you use AI and all of that, that is a problem.
While addressing whether AI is a death knell for engineers, Murthy said, “Yeah, however, in some areas like automatic driving, driverless cars, all those are good. For example, using AI in controlling power plant is an excellent thing, right? So, there are areas where human beings can use AI to reduce the resolution time for reaction and make those systems perform better. And surgery, for example, precision surgery. AI is useful in precision surgery; robotics is very useful. Those areas will add value to the humanity.”