Can India adapt AI to suit the country’s specific needs and context?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has introduced enticing possibilities globally. This topic has overwhelmed global parleys since ChatGPT was introduced about two years ago.
Yet, the conversation has focused relatively less on how emerging and developing countries could scale up and tailor AI to their own distinctive context. India, like all countries, faces several choices relating to the development and utilization of AI. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on his recent visit to the US, stressed India’s policy is to promote “AI for all." This would entail making AI inclusive for workers and firms.
Like any technology adoption problem in economics, AI faces the quintessential risk-return trade-off, compounded by concerns of equity. Here, I will not dwell on the development of AI, an area that is better left for technologists, and will instead focus on its economic implications in the Indian context. As the most populous country on the planet, the first implicative question for India is: How to make AI inclusive, and a growth tool for the vast pool of its workers? India is a labour-abundant country, and will still be expanding its productive cohorts, even while most developed and even emerging countries like China will be contracting theirs in the coming decades.
Basic economic thinking, therefore, would entail a choice of products and production methods that are comparatively labour intensive. Yet, ironically, India is increasingly using capital-intensive technologies, and labour in comparison has contributed less to India’s growth trajectory. India’s export baskets, in fact, have undergone a shift from labour-intensive products like textiles to capital-and skill-intensive ones
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