The supremacy of human intelligence for a long time has dominated this beautiful world of great diversity. Its ingenuity and innovativeness have enabled it to explore this beautiful world and its vast cosmos. With the advancement of Science and Technology during the last 100 years, the modern man began to assume itself as being the most superior among all the creation having mastered its understanding of planet earth and having created capabilities of space explorations. The human mind empowered with imagination infinite, capable of dwelling in the world of ideas and fantasies at the speed of thought had given the impression that perhaps there is nothing that can challenge the supremacy of man and hiscritical thinking abilities and powers of its intuitive faculty. But the recent advancements in the areas of machine intelligence and computer vision coupled with big data analytics and internet of everything have given rise to the emergence of an altogether new technology tools that have begun to challenge the human mind and its ingenuity. Artificial Intelligence, AI is one of the most powerful tools to comprehend the complexities of a wide variety of situations and systems and arrive at most optimal decisions, even beyond the conceivable limits of imaginations by human mind. In fact, with the ever rising horizons for applications of AI,the man has begun to now regard AI as the most powerful tool for human and professional excellence and also beginning to voice its major concern for AI emerging as a monster creating existential threats of the kind never and counted before.
AI- A Major Gamechanger:
In fact, Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged in recent times as a great gamechanger and is rapidly transforming the world, and its impact on work is no exception. AI-powered tools are already being used to automate tasks, smartly improve decision-making, improve surveillance, business intelligence, and are seen as potentially strong tools for radically transforming even education and scientific research. In the education sector from schools to the university the use of AI and Machine Learning shall enable increased learnability both inside as well as outside the classrooms and shall foster technology innovations for greeting the mega challenges such as climate change and water and food security. In the healthcare sector the efficacy of health informatics and early warning of diseases shall be facilitated by integration of AI in the smart and intelligent healthcare diagnostics. On the scientific research, the AI is bound to create infinite capabilities for not only understanding the way nature works but also creating the ease of misuse of AI capabilities for radically distracting the natural systems and resources. In fact, AI if misused shall pose far more serious ethical threats as compared to genetic modifications.
As such, as the applications of AI having no bound, integration of AI in various aspects of human endeavors and economic and social systems is bound to create unprecedented challenges and threats some of them arising outthe misuse of AI and its application to devastate this beautiful world. Given the phenomenal interest in AI and its applications, it is essential that as we continue to utilize AI to facilitate our work and augment our human mind, we seriously engage in mandating integration of moral values and ethics that should guide the use of AI for augmenting human mind and professional excellence.
AI – A Big Business for Global Economies:
According to Next Move StrategyConsulting (January 2023 report), the current market for artificial intelligence (AI) is estimated to be around 100 billion US dollars which is expected to grow twenty times to 2 trillion US dollars by 2030. The AI market covers a vast canvas of industries and the service sector. Everything from supply chain management, mapping the market and customer experience, product innovation, scientific research, data analytics, business intelligence, healthcare, education, social engineering,and governance all are going to get greatly integrated with AI for improving efficiency and effectiveness of services offering ease of doing business and facilitating the growth of industrial economies. The increasing use of AI in daily life on one hand shall create great advantage to humans and industrial systems but on the other hand uncontrolled use of smart and AI powered intelligent devices may make human beings, slaves of Hi-Tech devices and systems, thus crippling human capabilities beyond repairs.
Integration of Scientific Ethics and Professional Morals in AI –The Need of the Hour:
However, as AI utilizes the network systems and large data analytics based scientific tools of decision making it would be absolutely necessary to embed the layers of scientific and professional morals in the development of AI tools and AI applications. Some may argue that this amounts to putting breaks on advancement of AI and to herald the new era of technology explosion unleashed by the power of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. But economic progress and market size cannot be allowed to be the only consideration for technological innovations and scientific advancement. The human side of technology and its impact on sustainable development cannot be put on the back burners in our greed for economic gains alone, if we have to create and sustain a world of happiness and bliss for the global community.
The key to our success in harnessing the enormous power of AI for human and professional excellence lies in capabilities of the current and future generations of tech innovators to combine the strengths of both humans and machines. Now that the machines are becoming as intelligent as human mind, the case for integrating scientific ethics and professional morals in smart and intelligent technology device and systems cannot be anymore undermined.
**The author is the Founder Vice Chancellor of Delhi Technological University and Past President of Association of Indian Universities, AIU, currently is the Vice Chancellor of Amity University Haryana, Gurugram
