MoS Chandrasekhar Says AI Will Be Regulated Only To Prevent User Harm

Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Tuesday said he wasn’t a “big fan” of regulating emerging technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) will only be regulated through the prism of user harm.

During an event, the Minister said that the objective with Digital India Act (DIA) was to ensure that emerging technologies should not cause any harm to “Digital Nagariks”. He added that DIA will result in harmonisation of different laws and sectoral regulators will be consulted for this purpose.

“DIA will allow sectoral regulators such as RBI and SEBI and other ministries to create additional safeguards,” said Chandrasekhar.

He invited the industry to suggest guardrails for blockchain and Web 3.0. “We will not ban anything in the innovation space, unless it is linked with user harm. We want to lead the charge in Web 3.0 and in AI--with guardrails defined,” he said.

The session ‘Digital India Dialogues’ with Chandrasekhar was attended by a diverse range of stakeholders of the technology ecosystem including industry associations, startups, IT professionals, think tanks and lawyers. Around 300 stakeholders attended the consultation, with 125 people attending in-person and 175 attending virtually. A similar dialogue was held in Bengaluru in March this year.