Artificial Intelligence To Improve Quality Of Lives And Services
Artificial intelligence (AI) has often been the centre of many debates as one school of thought believes it will take away jobs from human beings. But, the situation on the ground can actually be quite different, particularly in a country like India.
"In India, most people are over-working…many of them end up working for 12 hours instead of 9 hours," Akilur Rahman, CTO, ABB India said at a panel discussion at the ongoing Zinnov Confluence 2017. He said that AI will, therefore, improve both the quality of lives of human beings as well as the quality of services.
Rahman added that AI will not kill jobs but will trigger human beings to use more of their brains, given that most utilise less than 10 per cent of their brain capacity.
Parth Pathak, Data Scientist at Microsoft believes that the AI ecosystem currently faces certain challenges such as mathematical optimisation. "We can make algorithms work much faster," he said. Given that any AI machine undergoes a continuous learning process, he says the other challenge is to enable faster transfer of learning across different domains.
In terms of investment, more and more AI-related companies are beginning to attract funding because of the promise it holds. "We invest in deep learning and security aspects of AI," said Abhishek Srivastava, Director, Endya Partners, a specialist technology venture capital firm.
According to a recent report by Zinnov titled 'The AI Spring: Innovations for the Next Decade', funding in AI startups globally has increased ten-fold (from $94 million in 2011 to $1049 million in 2016) in the last five years. "We believe that the potential for disruption in AI will be higher for verticals where there is a high level of data availability and high reliance on software," said Pari Natarajan, CEO, Zinnov.
