AI caution for India | Mint #AskBetterQuestions

While fears of artificial intelligence (AI) eliminating jobs are pervasive, India has reason to be particularly worried, according to Emad Mostaque, chief executive officer (CEO) of Stability AI, a company known for text-to-image generator tool Stable Diffusion. Indian engineers working in the information technology sector would be badly hit as AI deployment by multinationals would lessen work coming their way, Mostaque said. That labour protection remains weak in India exposes them further to job-loss risks. AI is rapidly invading our lives and could soon be powerful even without the need for an internet link, allowing tools to evade supervision. He isn’t the only tech leader who has flagged AI perils. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has advocated quick regulation, while Google and Microsoft executives have expressed anxiety too. Some of it sounds like the hype over AI capabilities or put-downs of what humans do at work, but the threat to jobs means labour-market planning no longer sounds like an idea taken from the Soviet model of a controlled economy. Instead, it is something that economic planners must pay attention to. Jobless growth can spawn all manner of crises.