What Barack Obama has to say on use of AI and its impact on the world – Times of India

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has piqued everyone’s interest. Tech companies, governments, users are now key stakeholders in the rise of AI. Recently, the US passed an executive order to regulate the use of AI among other things. In a detailed interview with The Verge, former US president Barack Obama spoke about the rise of AI and its impact. On the positive use of AI, Obama said that “it’s going to impact how we make stuff, how we deliver services, how we get information.” He further said that AI has the potential to “have enormous medical breakthroughs, the potential for us to be able to provide individualised tutoring for kids in remote areas, the potential for us to solve some of our energy challenges and deal with greenhouse gasses.”

View on having a regulatory framework for AI

The former US president said that it can’t be left to tech companies alone to manage and regulate AI.“We’re going to need to make sure that everybody can have confidence that whatever journey we’re on here with AI, that it’s not just being driven by a few people without any kind of interaction or voice from ordinary folks — the regular people who are going to be using these products and impacted by these products,” he said.
He also said that the tech companies he had interacted with gave him a sense that they too want everyone on board. “In my conversations with the tech leaders on this, I think there is, for the first time, some genuine humility because they are seeing the power that these models may have,” he added.
Obama believes that that companies know that if AI is as transformative as they expect to be “then having some rules and protections creates a competitive field that allows everybody to participate, come up with new products, compete on price, and compete on functionality, but [prevents us from] taking such big risks that the whole thing blows up in our faces.”