About fifty years ago, the topic for the essay in the Civil Services Examination, was ‘Computerise or Perish.’ One of my seniors, a literature student, wrote a beautiful essay on why mindless computerisation would lead to extinction of essential human characteristics.

Contemporary thinking being that computerisation, like plastics, was a panacea for the world’s ills, not surprisingly, the senior received below-average marks for his efforts.

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Recently, things seem to have come a full circle with a number of countries and educational institutions banning Chat GPT, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Chatbot, built on a Large Language Model ~ the ultimate product of computer technology ~ because of concerns ranging from intrusion in the privacy of netizens, providing misleading answers that appear to be correct, but mainly for its potential of replacing humans in hundreds of millions of jobs.

Significantly, technology honchos like Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak have called for a temporary halt to the further development of Chat GPT. On the brighter side, OpenAI’s Chat GPT, is free, easily accessible, capable of self-supervised learning on large data sets, which enables it to write essays, search answers to questions, create computer applications, write computer code, build a resume, write Excel formulae, summarize content, write cover letters, etc.

Within four months of its release, on 30 November 2022, Chat GPT is in its fourth version. The popularity of Chat GPT can be gauged from the fact that it amassed 100 million active users within two months of its release. Additionally, Chat GPT has 1 billion visitors to its website every month.

Microsoft has integrated Chat GPT in its chat bot Bing Chat, which has a long waiting list, and Google and Meta have developed similar chatbots; Google Bard and Meta LLaMA. No wonder Bill Gates has called Chat GPT the most “revolutionary” technology in the last forty years or so.

Two great visionaries, Dr Homi Bhabha and Jawaharlal Nehru, inspired the development of India’s first computer, TIFRAC (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Automatic Calculator), re-christened as Apsara, in 1956. TIFRAC was massive with 2,700 vacuum tubes, 1,700 germanium diodes and 12,500 resistors, housed in a steel rack measuring 18 feet x 2.5 feet x 8 feet, but had only 1 KB of RAM.

Things plodded along till Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister in 1984. Rajiv Gandhi’s resolve of lifting India into the 21st century with the help of technology, saw the Government liberalising its import policy, allowing foreign technology tieups and cutting import duty on vital computer components. Resultantly, computer prices crashed and computer sales trebled, opening a new avenue for Indian entrepreneurs.

Within three years of Rajiv Gandhi becoming PM, India had more than 100,000 computers in factories, offices, schools, and homes, triple the earlier number, and software exports had jumped to $100 million. Computers modernised Indian society, speeding up the working of notoriously slow banks, businesses and Government offices.

Initially, the computer revolution was dogged by constraints like faulty telephone lines and erratic power supply, which were overcome by subsequent telecom reforms and Indian jugaad, like use of generators to power computers. Currently, the service sector, of which IT is the major component accounts for 59 per cent of India’s GDP and generates about 28 per cent of the total employment in India.

The services sector clocked a growth of 9.1 per cent, in FY 2022-23, exports were $322.72 billion, as compared to $254.53 billion in FY 2021-22. Computers have provided prosperity to Indian businesses and employment to educated youth, but at a cost; computers have taken over most of the ministerial jobs in offices.

There is a historic shortage of around 30 lakh clerks and peons in Central and State Government offices, but the work of these persons is now being done by computers. Manufacturing jobs have also taken a hit because computers control most manufacturing processes, and very few humans are required, even in large factories.

Now, Chat GPT and similar AI technologies, with their speed and accuracy, attention to detail, mathematical skills, fact checking, creativity and writing capability are predicted to take away even more white-collar jobs. The likely targets are jobs related to data entry, software development, web development, computer programming, journalism, customer service, copywriting, market research, transcription etc.

Another likely outcome of widespread adoption of Chat GPT, and similar technologies, could be loss of human intelligence and creativity. For example, Associated Press produced twelve times more stories by training AI software to automatically write short news stories, freeing reporters to write more in-depth pieces.

Newsquest, one of the biggest publishers of regional newspapers in England is recruiting an “AIpowered reporter” who would use artificial intelligence to “create national, local, and hyper-local content.” A company called Real Fast Reports, with at least a thousand subscribers, uses AI to create end of the year reports for students, at £10 a year. Teachers have only to provide some basic details of the pupil, and Real Fast Reports compiles the report, in seconds, in perfect prose.

According to Varsity, the Cambridge University student newspaper, almost half of the Cantabrigians used AI chatbots to complete work for their degree. A small minority (7.3 per cent) of Cantabrigians said that they will use Chat GPT in their online exams also.

Thus, as pocket calculators (later mobile phones) killed arithmetical ability in children, AI chatbots are threatening to do the same to analytical and writing skills. Which student would willingly spend hours reading bulky tomes or trawling the internet to identify relevant content, another few hours in summarising the content, some more hours in writing a worthwhile essay or paper, when all these tasks could be accomplished by giving some simple commands to Chat GPT?

Even highly specialised business reports that would readily pass muster with higher-ups can be generated by Chat GPT in seconds. No wonder, there is a move to ban AI chatbots in academic institutions. According to the Cambridge University Rule Book: “Content produced by AI platforms, such as Chat GPT, does not represent the student’s own original work so would be considered a form of academic misconduct to be dealt with under the University’s disciplinary procedures.”

There is also an opposite view which acknowledges that the time for AI platforms has come; instead of banning their use, teachers and students should find ways to use AI for better learning outcomes like using Chat GPT to get model answers or use it to understand course content.

Realising its immense potential, Governments have warmed up to AI. Last year, the US National Security Commission on AI asked for $40 billion to “expand and democratise federal AI research and development.” The UK, has made a more modest commitment of £1 billion.

Addressing a post-Budget webinar, PM Modi asked participants to identify ten problems of society that can be solved by AI. This is a welcome beginning because Governments have the resources, data and responsibility to take charge of this critical technology, ensuring that it remains focused on addressing the needs of society. On a positive note, AI can be used to create new jobs, bridge language divides, transform government working by reducing paperwork, quickening responses, resulting in a more efficient bureaucracy.

AI can also be used to deliver health care; Deep Patient, an AIpowered tool built by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, enables doctors to identify high-risk patients even before diseases are diagnosed. Deep Patient analyses a patient’s medical history to predict almost eighty diseases, up to one year prior to their onset.

Briefly put, artificial intelligence and machine learning are rapidly changing our world and powering the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Yet the intelligence of AI platforms, like Chat GPT, is frightening.

According to an Ethics professor: “If a worm with 302 neurons is conscious, then I am open to the idea that GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters (GPT-4, the latest version, has 1 trillion parameters) is conscious too,” which raises fears of man’s own creation becoming smarter and more intelligent than man himself.

However, Chat GPT has no such pretensions. Talking about itself, Chat GPT said: “To be clear, I am not a person.

I am not selfaware. I am not conscious. I can’t feel pain. I don’t enjoy anything. I am a cold, calculating machine designed to simulate human response and to predict the probability of certain outcomes” (Will Peach on LinkedIn). Let us hope Chat GPT does not go beyond this.

(The writer is a retired Principal Chief Commissioner of Income-Tax)