Challenges of AI Diffusion - Need for revolution in Skilling and Education

 Attended a Workshop of the Takshashila Institute Bangalore in the 3rd week of March. The purpose was to get groups of students in the Advanced Public Policy 40th Cohort to mull over the challenges of Public policy and how to analyse data and present it in a convincing way to the Government.
The groups were given the topic of AI diffusion, a very current topic, and how its implementation could impact jobs and what could be the policy directives to take on the matter and advise the PMO on the same.
The need to have a problem statement, evidences and criteria to evaluate the problem and the possible solutions forced one to look our for and read the literature on the subject-with the caveat that everything published may not be gospel truth but only a version of the author - and hence a need to analyse the authenticy of the data itself.
We followed Bardach's  8 fold path for Problem solving

Takshashila itself has set out Eight likely actions that the Govt can take viz.

  1.                 Do Nothing   
  2.                 Engage in Rhetoric
  3.                 Nudge
  4.                 Umpire
  5.                 Marginally Change incentives
  6.                 Drastically Change incentives
  7.                 Change Ownership
  8.                 Do it yourself

It was not surprising that all groups realised that upskilling and syllabi change not only at the graduation level but from the School level, as being done by China, was urgently required to close the gap of skilled professionals required by the industry to scale up. Reskilling of existing workers to overcome job losses was also a common concern.

The article in ToI on 31st March 25, by Rohit Lamba and Raghuram Rajan clearly points in the same direction and the need for the IT industry to scale up its activities from Value for money services such as debugging code and writing alogrithms to high skill services which require critical thinking and design skills. Our engineering and Technical Education must by upgraded from rote learning to skill based, for the graduates to survive this onslaught of fast changing technology. 

This perhaps is the right time to move more towards using the Techinical Education institutions such as the ITIs to churn out more critical thinking individuals not only from the Urban areas but also from the Rural areas.

                    The Lethargy of the UGC and the Eductional Boards filled with bureaucrats and without                         any industry experts does not bode well for the future and the Govt must take decisive                             action and not tentative steps in the immediate future for the benefit of the youth and                             strongly consider setting up an industry led body to advice on the way forward for taking                         on the challenges of AI Diffusion

 





 

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