New Delhi: AI is revolutionizing industries around the globe—from healthcare to the tech and creative industries—by automating tedious tasks and opening doors to new opportunities. While concerns about job displacement exist, AI offers avenues for growth through upskilling and the creation of roles that didn’t exist before.
Ethical AI governance and public-private partnerships with appropriate cybersecurity infrastructure can ensure that this technology realizes humans’ best interests. As AI evolves, it transforms the global vista while finding a balance between progress, safety, and opportunity.
In a recent email interview, Anand Birje, the CEO of Encora and former Digital Business Head of HCL Technologies, shared his insights on the existential risks posed by advanced technologies.
How Is Generative AI Impacting Job Creation?
AI is reshaping the job landscape, but it is not a simple story of replacement. We can see major shifts in healthcare, tech, creative fields and every vertical with AI increasing the scope of existing roles by reducing repetitive and mundane tasks. However, while a percentage of roles that involve routine tasks may get phased out, AI will also create entirely new roles, responsibilities and positions that currently do not exist.
For enterprises as well as individuals, the key to navigating these times of change is adaptation. According to him “We need to focus on training people and create a culture where upskilling and reskilling are constant. This cultural shift requires a change in individual mindset and must form an essential part of change management strategies for enterprises”.
Forward-looking enterprises are already helping their people realize and appreciate the true scale of change being brought by AI–and the challenges, but also the opportunities this presents for them to progress in their careers.
AI is not the existential threat to jobs that many fear, however, it will force us to reinvent the nature of work and evolve as individuals in the process to harness its full potential. You can draw a parallel with the wheel.
Humans could and did travel and transport goods before its invention, but the wheel allowed us to save energy and time to focus on other areas and opened new avenues of progress for our civilization.
End-to-End Encryption Fails to Prevent Data Leaks?
Trust in social media platforms nowadays is a big issue right now, affecting millions of users globally, including all of us. Encryption helps, but it is not enough; it’s just one piece of a complex puzzle. What we need is a multilayered approach that involves transparency, compliance, and accountability. Recent times have seen a shift in this direction, with companies disclosing the geographical location as well as how they plan to leverage user data.
As for regulations, we need to find the right balance. According to him, “We need frameworks that protect users while still allowing for technological progress. These frameworks must address the unique complexities of different geographies, comply with local regulations and global standards, and safeguard user privacy while leaving room for innovation and creativity”.
The tech industry must step up and adopt a ‘privacy by design’ approach. This means building guardrails into products and services from the ground up, not as an afterthought.
This is truer than ever in a world where AI is being leveraged for identity theft, misinformation, and manipulation. Ultimately, building trust will require deeper collaboration between tech companies, regulators, and users themselves, and this is a key factor to consider as we redesign digital channels to adapt to an AI world.
Should We Be Concerned About AI’s Existential Threat?
We should take these warnings seriously. But it is also crucial to differentiate between immediate, concrete risks and long-term, speculative concerns. The real threats we face today are not sci-fi scenarios of AI dominance. They are more subtle – things like AI bias, privacy breaches, echo chambers, and the spread of misinformation. These are real problems affecting real people right now.
To address these, we need collaboration. It is not something any one company or even one country can solve alone. According to him, “We need governments, tech firms, and academics working together to ensure that standards for ethics, transparency and compliance are set for areas that involve AI usage. Public education in the benefits of AI as well as the pitfalls associated with it. is also important, to ensure safe use”.
But here is the thing–while we work on these risks, we cannot forget the good AI can do. It is a powerful tool that could help solve big global problems. We need to be careful with AI, but also hopeful about what it can achieve. This is a big challenge for our generation, and we need to step up to it.
Where Government Falls Short in Addressing Digital Fraud?
Online financial fraud is a growing concern. While the government has made efforts, we are still playing catch-up. The main challenge is speed – cybercriminals move fast, and our legal and regulatory frameworks often struggle to keep up. With the advent of modern technologies such as Gen AI, cybercrime continues to grow in sophistication, scale, and speed.
Regulatory bodies and government agencies must work together with technology companies and bring the best technological talent to bear against cybercrimes. According to him, “We need to think outside the box, for instance, build a real-time threat sharing platform between technology companies and government agencies that can help identify and stop financial cybercrime in its tracks”.
We also need a more proactive strategy and an update to the legal framework. Conventional laws are ill-equipped to deal with modern cybercrime and this can lead to apathy or lack of speed when addressing it.
Digital literacy is crucial too, many frauds succeed simply because people are not aware of the risks. This holds true for a country like India, where widespread internet penetration to rural areas and so to the majority of the population is a new phenomenon.
To sum up, the risk of AI being used for financial cybercrime is very real. To combat it effectively, we need better technology, smarter regulation, improved education, and closer collaboration across sectors.
Should Governments Regulate AI?
In my view, some level of government oversight for AI is not just advisable, but necessary. Ideally created through public-private partnerships, this oversight is needed to ensure safety and ethical usage of AI even as the technology quickly becomes ubiquitous in our drive to infuse creativity and innovation across work streams.
We need a framework that is flexible and adaptable and focuses on transparency, accountability, and fairness. The regulatory approach would depend heavily on local government bodies; however, it can be tiered so that the level of oversight and regulatory requirements are directly proportional to capabilities and potential impact.
For instance, an AI being used to help marketers make their copy more engaging does not require the same level of oversight as an AI that helps process insurance claims for the healthcare industry.
According to him, “We also need to think about AI’s broader societal impact and take active steps to address issues like job displacement and data privacy. By keeping them firmly in our sights, we can ensure that the policies being developed to regulate AI are in the best interest of the public and align with our values and human rights”.
Effective AI regulation will require ongoing dialogue between policymakers, industry leaders, and the public. It is about striking the right balance between innovation and responsible development, harnessing the technology’s full potential while protecting our civilization from its side-effects.
Are AI and Robotics a Danger to Humanity?
Look, ‘Terminator’ makes for great entertainment, but we are far from that reality. AI for the first time can make decisions and has evolved from ‘tools’ to ‘agents’ and the real and immediate risks are not around AI taking over the world but how humans might misuse the massive potential that it brings to the table. At present, we should be more concerned about the use of AI for privacy invasions, autonomous weapons, misinformation, and disinformation.
According to him, “We are at a crucial point in shaping its development, a few moments before the technology becomes ubiquitous. We need to prioritize safety and global governance frameworks, create clear ethical guidelines and failsafe mechanisms, invest in AI literacy, and keep humans in control of critical decisions”.
Prevention is about being proactive. The goal should be to use AI wisely. We should not fear it, but we do need to guide it in the right direction. It is all about finding that sweet spot between progress and responsibility.
How Vulnerable Are AI Military Systems To Cyberattacks?
This is an important question. As AI gets integrated more closely with our existing infrastructure, there are a few areas where it has the potential to cause the most chaos. According to him, AI in military systems is one of these areas that requires us to tread with extreme caution.
From data poisoning to manipulate decisions and adversarial attacks to theft of sensitive data and unauthorized access, there are many ways AI integration can lead to vulnerabilities and challenges for the military and cause significant damage in the process.
For instance, evasion attacks can be used to change the color of a few pixels in a way that is imperceptible to the human eye. However, AI will now misclassify the images and do so with confidence. This can be used to attack AI systems involved in facial detection or target recognition, to disastrous consequences.
So how do we tackle this? We need best-in-class cybersecurity and robust AI systems that can explain their decisions for human verification. This is an area where government agencies are advised to work closely with technology companies to implement AI systems that can identify and resist manipulation, bring in Zero Trust Architecture for sensitive digital infrastructure and involve humans in the decision-making process for important situations.
AI should support military decision-making, not replace human judgment.