We need to aggressively invest in education, continued education and invest new dollars into entrepreneurship

India needs to be very concerned about cyber security and fake news as the country heads for the next elections, says former U.S. chief data scientist D.J. Patil. He says that the democratic process in the U.S. as well as countries like France faced cyberattacks aimed at stealing information and propagating fake news on social media to impact elections. At an event in Bengaluru, the first chief data scientist to the U.S. Government, appointed by the Obama Administration, says that there is going to be a massive shift in cyberattacks where they would be based on artificial intelligence (AI). In an interview, Mr.Patil talks about the impact of AI on economy, jobs and cyber security. Edited excerpts:

What would be the economic impact of artificial intelligence?

We published a report, it is called the White House Report on artificial intelligence. It highlights the challenges that are coming ahead and one of those big challenges is that if you look at many economic assessments, they are all saying the radical displacement of jobs due to automation. A big component of that automation is robotics, another big component is machine learning, deep learning, AI-based type of technologies. We have to ask ourselves, as we get better automation overall, what is going to happen to the society. Bank tellers, e-discovery for lawyers and also the role and jobs for other areas such as self-driving cars and other vehicles. Where is this going?

We have to ask. We are seeing reports out of Foxconn where they are automating tremendous amount of their product lines. They were one of the large employers. What does that mean? Here in India, we have these large IT players, those type of coding jobs specially developed towards testing or other things, I am very concerned that those are the jobs that are going to be replaced by automated processes.

Is this going to be a big concern in India? If so, how can it be addressed?

That is the conversation that needs to happen now. No one has an obvious answer. The one that we can all agree on is foundational, that we need to aggressively invest in education, continued education and the investment of new dollars into entrepreneurship. If we forget that some of these great companies didn’t just come about because of the investment, Infosys came about because people had relentless drive not to give up. We need to make it easier for people to start new things and test those ideas, for those ideas to be acquired or combined with other ideas, new things to come about. We should celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit and reward it and challenge those entrepreneurs to always work on societies and most pressing problems.

Amid this emergence of AI and data explosion, how can we uphold data security and privacy?

When I was (U.S.) chief data scientist, this is what I called on. For every training programme, ethics and security must be core part of the curriculum. It doesn’t matter whether you are an economist, a computer scientist, data scientist, a statistician, a physicist. You must have ethics and security as part of the core curriculum. Because, if you design a database, you need to know how someone is going to attack it, you also need to understand what are the ethical implications of how it may be designed and is this good or bad. We have to develop a language to start asking ourselves are we comfortable with the choices we make, so it starts from there. The second part of it is really being much more comfortable with asking for help in understanding vulnerabilities, [for example] bug bounty programmes, idea of encouraging other people to attack our systems in a safe constructive way. Simultaneously, also investing more aggressively in research platforms for cybersecurity and also investment in replacing legacy systems because they have too many holes in them.

Is there any need for a policy for these new technologies in India?

(In the U.S) we have policy guidance on AI, it is guidance that helps to figure out how we should think about things. But it doesn’t specifically say you can or can’t do this. But it tries to provide the guidance in saying that the ark of technology is going so fast, that the policy is going to be needed to create guard rails for it rather than a very specific isolated process.

A lot of this data on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook is also leading to fake news and rumour-mongering, your comments?

I would encourage data scientists to play less with the social media data [and] play more with the local data. Have a direct impact on the people in the local community. I think that has a phenomenal opportunity to lift up problems and have a direct impact.

On the questions of other issues around news and the data that they are collecting, the question we should be asking more is how do we make sure that everyone has access to their data and what are the rights and make sure you understand the rights of that data. We also have to remind companies that if they are not holding up to their end of the social bargain, that’s when the regulations come in. And the regulations would come in such a draconian way that I am fearful that it would eliminate a large portion of things that other entrepreneurs wouldn’t be able to tackle. I think India needs to be very concerned about the next democratic process around cybersecurity as well as fake news.

Do you see huge opportunities for AI start-ups apart from companies such as Facebook and Google who are dominating this space?

In the U.S. it is phenomenal. If you look at the investments in the Silicon Valley (in California), Silicon Slopes (in Utah), Silicon Alley ( in Manhattan). Silicon Prairie (a take on the Silicon Valley, refers to one of several places in the U.S).

This is phenomenal, we have all these investments. Many of those ideas would fail, that is okay, plant the next idea, try, try again, something would come out of it.

As long as people are trying and the youth are aggressively investing in the ideas, I am okay. I would encourage India to make it easier for people to invest, not just invest dollars but to invest time and energy in trying new things. Taking the risk, that is where it starts.