He advises young professionals to prepare and train themselves in new technologies

The emergence of Artificial Intelligence and automation is going to have a huge impact on jobs in the country, says former U.S. chief data scientist D.J. Patil.

“Everybody talks about self-driving cars, but we don’t talk about boring stuff, (like) bank tellers,” Mr. Patil told his co-panelist Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani during a fireside chat at an event in Bengaluru. “I recently went to a hotel and they didn’t have lawn mowers anymore, they had robots.”

Mr. Patil said that in the tech sector, where he is really concerned about, the current model is heavily around small, added features like upgrading or software testing. “And testing is one of those areas that is really going to be replaced by AI.”

He said the industry has ridden the IT wave phenomenally well, the question is how do we capitalise on the next wave. “Is it going to happen in the next three years? No. Next decade? Oh, absolutely.”

The first chief data scientist to the U.S. Government, appointed by the Obama Administration, advised the young professionals to prepare and train themselves in new technologies in areas such as artificial intelligence, cyber security and healthcare.

Artificial Intelligence

AI aims to build machines that can simulate human intelligence processes, while Stanford University describes machine learning as “the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed”.

Mr. Nilekani emphasised that the young professionals need to be prepared for life-long learning and not be dependent on just getting a degree to be ready for employment. “Things are changing and they are changing very rapidly,” he said.

Mr. Nilekani said the challenge in the educational system in India and the U.S is that they are not designed for this new world and the courses taught at the colleges are behind what the industry needs.“The future is life long learning, anytime anywhere learning,” he said.

Mr. Patil, who was responsible for unleashing the power of data for the benefit of the public in the U.S., mentioned that there was an opportunity of building a self-driving car to work on Bengaluru roads. To this, Mr. Nilekani responded by saying that self-driving cars on Bengaluru roads are a few decades away. He said this problem can be solved for the California road as everyone follows the rules. “Here, there would be a cow, pig, a guy wandering around.”

Need for policy

Mr. Nilekani, who spearheaded India’s massive unique identification project, asked Mr. Patil if he thinks AI would accelerate rich-poor divide. To this, Mr. Patil said that it absolutely would create a divide if we don’t get ahead of it. He gave the example of its effect in the Silicon Valley. But there is a huge percentage of the U.S. that has not have the economic recovery, he said.

Mr. Nilekani agreed with the need for policy and gave the example of increasing amount of data and how it is being aggregated in areas like platforms which is actually a big risk. “You end up with data monopoly,” he said. “I am deeply concerned that data is going to create a new set of monopolies and whole new model of colonisation.”

Mr. Patil responded by saying that there is a darker force, as there are companies which are calculating and sitting on data that one never gave them the right to capture. These include satellite images, copying records of the court cases and they are selling it to a creditor, or somebody else and one has no recourse and ability to know that the data was moved, he said. “This is where I would love to be a very strong policy. India has a great opportunity to learn from things that we didn't do correctly,” said Mr. Patil.

Goods and Services Tax

Mr. Nilekani mentioned that India is creating digital ‘consent architecture’, where citizens can store financial or health in a digital locker and make their own decisions to give that data to somebody else.

He also said the recently launched Goods and Services Tax (GST) is going to be a phenomenal source of data insights. For the first time, it would be possible to digitally record eight million businesses in a central tax database. This means about one billion records would float into the GST system every month. He said that this is going to be a massive source of figuring out how the economy is growing and where it is not growing.

Mr. Patil responded by saying that this technology footprint is no minor feat. He said when one is looking for the next place to go hunting for new things to build and new ideas, there is no reason that new types of technologies should only be invented in the Silicon Valley. “When you are working at this order of magnitude with that type of sensitivity of data, with that critical infrastructure, that should be invented here (India).”