Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the state minister for electronics and information technology, said on Friday that the government will regulate artificial intelligence and all other technologies based on the potential danger they pose to people.
The minister assuaged concerns that the development of AI will result in job losses by stating that such a danger would not materialise in the upcoming years, but that it might do so in 5-7 years.
“Our approach towards AI or any regulation is that we will regulate it through the prism of user harm. This is a new philosophy, which has started since 2014 that we will protect digital nagriks. We will not allow platforms harming digital nagriks. If they operate here, then they will mitigate user harm,” Chandrasekhar mentioned.
He was speaking at a gathering to celebrate the accomplishments of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration over the past nine years.
Sam Altman, the founder and CEO of OpenAI, recently visited India, according to Chandrasekhar, and this visit is a key indicator of India’s potential in the field of developing technologies.
The minister claimed that while section 79 of the IT Act was introduced under the Congress-led UPA regime, giving giant digital platforms free reign, the present administration has introduced regulations to hold big internet companies accountable.
He took a dig towards the former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan for his criticism of the production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme launched by the BJP government.
“Sometimes Raghuram Rajan, a new Congress member, talks about it. For him, the moral of the story is that you will embarrass yourself less if you do not talk much about the subject you don’t know much about.”
The minister indicated a “massive leap” in the electronics manufacturing sector in India.
“We are manufacturing 100 per cent mobiles in the country unlike importing eighty per cent of the product in the past,” he further said, “Last year, we exported mobile phones worth over Rs 1 lakh crore”.
Chandrasekhar said that India under the leadership of Prime Minister Modi is becoming a “global trusted partner” in terms of manufacturing.
The minister mentioned that the government has allowed an open route and a revised scheme for semiconductors and thereby received applications from venture like Vedanta-Foxconn JV for the purpose of fetching incentives.
“In the interim, in the next 90 days, as we wait for SROs, the government will make a decision on what is permissible or not permissible,” he added.
