At a time when Google is moving into an ‘artificial intelligence first’ world, the Internet giant sees India playing a key role for many of its AI related bets. Google’s AI technologies are being used for numerous applications such as detecting diabetic retinopathy, hunting for exoplanets using data from space agency NASA and analysing a vast amount of footage shot by drones.
“I think [India’s role] is a very significant one,” Prabhakar Raghavan, vice-president of engineering at Google, told The Hindu. “ You need a somewhat technically literate workforce and I am not talking about PhDs in computer science. And if you look at that, India is already a leader by any means,” he said.
“So, I think all the ingredients are there [ in India], now it is up to people’s imaginations and passion to make things happen,” said Dr. Raghavan, who was in India recently for a Google AI event. The programme which was attended by top researchers and techies from IITs and companies such as Amazon, Flipkart, Microsoft and Ola.
A former IBM and Yahoo research veteran, Dr. Raghavan said that AI presented raw economic opportunity in tons of billions of dollars for the world and economies like India. “But I think we take special pride in the ones that have made major differences even to one life, whether or not it is a lot of money.” Vehicle manufacturers are embedding these AI features even in inexpensive cars and “if even one life got saved as a result, that is a victory for all of us.” he said.
Though Google operates two of the top AI research labs in the world — DeepMind in London and Google Brain in California, Dr. Raghavan said a lot of great work was being done in places like India. “There is a lot going on in companies in India and elsewhere that you may not see as ML (machine learning) or AI.”
Google and researchers in India have built an AI-based diagnostic tool for detecting diabetic retinopathy. The condition is the fastest-growing cause of blindness, with close to 425 million diabetic patients at risk worldwide. Institutes such as Aravind Eye Hospital and Sankara Nethralaya are working with patients to validate the tool.
Last year, Google also acquired Bengaluru-based Halli Labs that applies modern AI and machine-learning techniques to solve old problems. The same year it also led a $12.3-million funding round in dunzo, a task-fulfilment start-up that leverages AI and human operators.
China’s AI race
While China has committed to becoming the world’s leader in AI by 2030, pledging billions of dollars in the endeavour, Dr. Raghavan said India had to go beyond the implementation of policies to take a leap in this field. Crucially, innovations had to happen at the grass-roots level. “I think the last thing innovation needs is... some boss man telling you to innovate.”
AI was expected to drive some of the most important services, but there was a growing concern that it could replicate the prejudices that humans had about gender and race. When asked about the steps Google was taking to tackle these biases, Dr. Raghavan, an alumnus of U.C. Berkeley and IIT-Madras, said a lot of de-biasing was getting built into the algorithms and the researchers had come up with fairly robust defences.
“Would I claim to you we are perfect? We are not. My point is that the gap that needs to be addressed is vanishing over time,” he said. He pointed out that the first step in dealing with racial biases was awareness.
On combating fake news which was used to influence the elections in Europe and the U.S., Dr. Raghavan said: “AI and ML is the hammer but I don’t think we have quite pinned down the nail.” But he said there was a large effort on thinking hard about news and how to elevate its quality.
Automation also threatens 69% of the jobs in India, while it’s 77% in China, according to a World Bank research. Dr. Raghavan, who was a consulting professor of computer science at Stanford University, said human ingenuity changed the role of productive work. He said the best thing that AI could do was to remove tedium from our lives so that we could go on doing more creative things. He gave the example of coal miners in some places in the U.S., who, after losing work, became computer coders, building websites, games and apps.
“It is not a moment now of saying, ‘Oh my God’ AI is taking away the jobs. A lot of things have taken away one form of jobs and humans have come back with another,” Mr. Raghavan said.
