Dialogues on AI - Ethics of AI for India

Sunil Abraham moderated one of the three sessions, and the event saw a total of 24 participants from industry, academia, law/policy, and civil society. Ambika Tandon, Shweta Mohandas, and Pranav Manjesh Bidare also attended the event.

Ethics of AI for India

Facebook and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) jointly present the first in a national series of roundtables focussing on emerging policy, ethical, and governance concerns relating to Artificial Intelligence (AI) in India. These roundtables aim to stimulate the discourse in India by providing curated, closed-door settings for a diverse group of experts to come together to advance the Indian AI narrative.

The first roundtable – in Bangalore – is designed to draw from the extensive regional expertise available in India’s technology hub and serve as a broader foundation for future roundtables. With the abundance of AI talent in the region, we have designed this first interaction to address several foundational yet critical questions surrounding AI. We hope that this discussion and learnings from it will serve as a key base and starting point for future discourse – intellectually driven from Bangalore – and will lay benchmarks for subsequent development and thought leadership in the area.

The roundtable focused on three key threads:

1. AI – Evolving a Common Terminology: This thread will aim to provide a primer to the AI revolution and help newcomers and experienced professionals alike evolve a common framework and taxonomy to guide policy discussions, research, and future discourse. Discussions will look to distil conceptual clarity on topics like artificial intelligence v. machine learning v. deep learning and provide technical and philosophical foundations to those from diverse fields.
2. AI Ethics: This thread will aim to stimulate and provoke discussion on the ethical norms that must underpin research, development, and the use of AI. Specific issues for discussion include openness, transparency, privacy, and moral issues. We expect a key part of this discussion will revolve around questions of whether specific laws or regulations are required to account for questions posed by AI in its various forms.
3. AI for India: The last thread of this discussion will aim to transition the debate on ethics and policy towards the application realm. Specifically, this discussion will look to focus on how the Indian public and private sector actors can capitalise on developments in AI to drive social and economic change. From a governance point of view, we will also look to cover how AI can be used to tackle key challenges in public distribution, law and order, regulation, and defence. We expect that key questions will revolve around deployment of AI towards governance, service delivery, manufacturing, and the effect of AI on employment.

Event Primer