Saturday, August 2, 2025

Artificial Intelligence – A tectonic shift is underway

 

AI – Genie is out of the bottle


I, vividly remember the beautiful day , it was 11th October, 2017 when Sophia, a humanoid robot, mesmerised the audience with  an interesting interaction with UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed at UN Headquarter in New York. This awe inspiring sight  of Sophia responding to the question raised by Amina J. Mohammed filled me with strange emotions of appreciation and fear. The appreciation was obviously for  the astounding technological progress Homo Sapiens have made over the centuries – their journey from the caves to the dazzling cities is a testimony of the victory of the cognitive intelligence of the smartest race of human beings . The fear, that AI enabled humanoid robots may outsmart their creators quickly rushed into grey cells - though  it stayed there only for a fleeting moment and quickly vanished into nothingness.

The mad rush for an unassailable lead by the companies and countries in the AI technology innovations in last 8 years has led to the unprecedented level of innovations in both AI Enterprise and AI Consumer space. Despite, the huge success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and unparalleled market disruption by Deepseek, I never got perturbed about the potential replacement of human work force by machines.  However the announcement of Nobel Prize for the year 2024 that included the names of John J. Hopfield, Geoffery Hinton  Demmis Hassibis  and John Jumper made me believe that something is changing faster than our imagination. Let us dive into the ocean of the possibilities and explore to find the reality beneath.


AI -Market Size 

 

The market is a master story teller that tells the compelling stories of the possible impact unleashed by the disruptive technologies on the corporate organisations, human work force and overall society at large. According to Mckinsey report, organizations have already started re-wiring the ways to run the company  with the focussed approach on generating values from AI. According to Statista, the market size for AI is expected to growth an annual growth rate (CAGR 2025-2031) of 26.60%, resulting in a market volume of US$1.01tn by 2031. Another report outlines that market valuation  of AI in HR in 2025 is US$ 8.16bn which is growing at CAGR of 15%. Not only that , it is has been assessed that in 2025, AI will evolve from a tool for work and home to an integral part of both. In the last year alone, generative AI usage jumped from 55% to 75% among business leaders and AI decision makers. Very recently Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc. created waves by stating “AI is bigger than internet”. We cannot afford to ignore  the reverberation of likely tectonic shift in the world of technology, impacting all sectors and touching human lives, directly, indirectly, positively or negatively.


AI - Path ahead on a road less travelled 


The revered, “AI”,  is already transforming the world we are living in myriad ways. “Agentic AI”, with their supercharged reasoning and execution capabilities, promises to transform many aspects of human-machine collaboration such as proactively managing complex IT system, dynamically re-configuring supply chains in response to geopolitical or weather disruptions etc. AI Models with the ability to predict the protein structure and create new designs is revolutionising the drug development process . The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in the military domain is radically changing the art of war and a nation's ability to anticipate, plan, and execute actions. It is already playing pivotal role in target detection, coordination of cyber defence operations, or real-time massive data analysis. Health and diagnostics is another area where lot of processes will be substituted by AI enabled tools. There is also debate going on  about the role of agentic AI in providing Patient Care services. Collaborative Robots (Co-Bots) are no more the species found only in sci-fi movies , they have started  operating in buddy environments along with their fellow human colleagues in various plants and offices. Going forward the collaborative robots will have the better ability to understand their surroundings. Multimodal AI will revolutionize communication by enabling more intuitive human-computer interaction. For example, in financial services, this could involve analysing market commentary videos and considering non-verbal cues, like tone of voice and facial expressions, alongside the spoken words for a more nuanced understanding of market sentiment. It is difficult to fathom the extent , AI will invade or enter our daily routine -Keep gazing the crystal ball.


AI - Walking on thin ice 

 

Every new technology brings the abundance of freshly minted challenges, nicely packed in the goody bag of benefits for the people and society. Only difference in the case of AI is the scale and impact – social and political consequences of this technology is deep and far reaching.Yuval Noha Harrai expressed his deep concern about this  in his book “Nexus” by stating that  “ AI  could tilt the technological balance of power in favour of Totalitarianism”. It will be interesting to review and  delve deep into some of the challenges that are already staring at us in the face. 


  • Job Losses - Future of work will be hugely impacted by AI. New jobs will also be created however its difficult to measure the exact impact. Estimates suggest that AI could potentially replace whopping 800 million jobs worldwide by 2030.
  • Deepfakes – The increasing threat of deepfakes is  not strange to us. There are umpteen horrifying examples of deepfakes. In March 2022, shortly after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian public was surprised to see a video of their president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, urging the military to lay down their weapons and surrender to the invading forces. As the video spread on social media and gained traction in the news, Zelenskyy’s office quickly disavowed its authenticity. 
  • Environmental Impact –The computational power required to train generative AI models that often have billions of parameters, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, can demand a staggering amount of electricity, which leads to increased carbon dioxide emissions and pressures on the electric grid. By 2026, the electricity consumption of data centres is expected to approach 1,050 terawatts (which would bump data centres up to fifth place on the global list, between Japan and Russia).
  • Geo -Political Impact - AI's revolutionary potential is altering the global power equations. The strategic use of AI technologies affect the surveillance technology, information warfare, and military capabilities among many others. In the future clashes between countries , AI would become an actor, not just a factor.  There is a mind boggling race going between US led companies and Chinese for the control of AI Space. 
  • Recursive Learning - In the pursuit of AGI, one of the most critical challenge is creating machines that can improve themselves without human intervention. Currently, AI systems are limited to learning from human-provided data and tasks. Organistions are working overtime off course with some success to enhance its abilities autonomously, through recursive self-improvement. Many experts believe that AI  systems may start to think for themselves, and even seek to take over or eliminate human civilization. 
  • Rogue Agents –Yoshua Bengio” (Founder of LawZero),  argues that  "Currently, AI is developed to maximize profit. Agency can easily be used for malicious purposes such as disinformation, bioweapons, and cyberattacks”. Many such cases have been reported in recent past – According to a BBC report “Artificial intelligence (AI) firm Anthropic says testing of its new system revealed it is sometimes willing to pursue "extremely harmful actions" such as attempting to blackmail engineers who say they will remove it.
  • Future Work Culture – The organistions are yet to experience the impact  of AGI on their cultural DNA. It will  be quite interesting to observe the human behaviour while working with humanoid robot as a supervisor  or reportee.
  • Ethical Concerns -Many of us may not be aware but our data  is being used for  training without necessary consent violating the premise of data privacy. The concerns are being raised by the informed citizens about the possible  biases and opacity in decisions taken by AI enabled decision makers.
  • AI is making homo sapiens dumb – The study by MIT and other organisations have revealed that reliance on AI might impact the cognitive abilities of the sapiens.
 

AI - Reality and Responsibility  

 

The scale and speed of AI revolution does have the potential to alter the course of progress of mankind. The experts are talking about both AI Utopia and AI Apocalypse in the same breadth, some technology heavyweights are even advising to slowdown the progress of AI but the stakes in the game are too high- these mellifluous sane voices will be lost in the din.

 

Beyond the cogent arguments and never ending scholarly debates about the tangible benefits and real threats we must understand  that AI is a reality and has already made its way into machines in our hand. We do not have a choice but to accept and adopt it with greater responsibility that involves, the consideration of a broader societal impact of AI systems and the measures required to align these technologies with stakeholder values, legal standards and ethical principles.

 

It is believed that AI will touch human lives in an unprecedented way in the course of time – some will reap the benefits, some may bear the burnt.  The million dollar question that worries me is not about the power of technology but the readiness of mankind to deal with it.


References 


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