‘There’s no doing away with humans in the age of AI’: Nobel laureate Michael Spence

He said that this generation of AI has the potential to produce an enormous productivity in research as vast amounts of data can be interpreted by AI and accessed by anyone who may or may not be technically trained.

Former director general of CSIR Raghunath Mashelkar and vice chancellor of GIPE Ajit Ranade were also present at the event.

Allaying fears of Artificial Intelligence rendering humans jobless, Nobel laureate Michael Spence spoke about the potentials of AI in all fields and the need to recognise that society is moving in the direction of machine-human collaboration.

Speaking at Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, the 80-year-old American economist said, “Once we benchmark AI against humans, the next step can be a dangerous one. If AI advances faster than humans, why don’t we get rid of the human? We need to avoid that and instead consider that the way this will evolve is in the direction of machine-human collaboration and powerful digital assistance.”

He said that this generation of AI has the potential to produce an enormous productivity in research as vast amounts of data can be interpreted by AI and accessed by anyone who may or may not be technically trained.

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“AI can understand the complex supply chain systems in ways that would be extremely difficult for humans to fully comprehend. With this understanding, disruptions during the pandemic could be avoided,” Spence said while delivering the 84th Kale Memorial Lecture at Gokhale Institute. Spence spoke about the potentials of AI in other fields.

“I was told by the CEO of a major news publication that their paper which was earlier only published in English can now be translated to 28 other languages and published digitally at no additional costs using AI technology.”
From speech recognition to translation, genome sequencing and molecular modelling, he highlighted the various technological breakthroughs happening worldwide, especially those in close conversation with the field of biomedicine.

Former director general of CSIR Raghunath Mashelkar and vice chancellor of GIPE Ajit Ranade were also present at the event.

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