There was a good discussion on the usability of AI and its effect in developing countries and emerging economies. Speakers highlighted that the discussion on emerging technologies and how they affect us.
At the beginning of the panel, Nnenna Nwakanma from the Worldwide Web Foundation, quoting Sir Tim Berners Lee said, “initial thinking was that if we bring technology to human beings, they will do good things with it.” She shared some of outcomes of the work of Web Foundation, on AI. Specially, she highlighted the use of AI in service delivery sector like health, agriculture and other government service sector. However, one of major issues of AI is, she said, multilingualism. Due to the dynamism of multilingualism, there is a big threat of failure of Artificial Intelligence is being used in Africa. She also discussed about the designing of the code. All the codes are heavily reflections of the people who code. She also stressed that, the coding should be unbiased and for this, an inclusive approach could help out.
Prof. Dr. LIU CHUANG, highlighted the use of AI in China and how China is leading the front. Even in Chaina, she said, it is very hot topic now. Not only in the commerce, rather at everywhere. Some of area likes earthquake monitoring, restaurant, AI port, education etc. Because this is new, we are changing a whole lot about the society. Artificial Intelligence there is something good, something not good. So we need thinking about this in advantage. So I think it's true we thinking about the principles for the AI development. Developing countries should pay more attention about the AI and education. So otherwise, always could catch this advantage. Besides education in China, it's legislation to pay more attention on this. She thought the formal legal above the AI is not coming. One is big data. Second is human behavior. Third one is cloud computing or e‑computing. And third one is high‑speed communication. But China had a very serious legal system managing the four different issues. Right now, everybody pay more attention of the advantages to help themselves. Economic, education, research. And other things that go this way.
Mr. BIKASH GURUNG, shared how AI is growing in Nepal, a tiny country situated in between giant economies Cina and India. If we talk about the progress in Nepal how AI has been here, as he said, there has been few companies leading AI revolution and follow up is done by lots of community organizations like AI for Development, Pilot technologies, Cloud Factories etc. There has been technology that has been built for visually impaired. There is another technology that has been built which can provide smart data‑driven multi-cultural intelligent system. Also, emergency response, drone delivery system, robot restaurant. There has been a knowledge gap in Nepal. This technology is not built here. People are trying so hard to get up on the technology. And also, we are facing biased algorithms that do not lead us to what Nepal's choice is. You have to face the developed country prospects. So that has been one of the challenges.
Prof. KS Park analyzed the use of AI and freedom of expression perspective. He raised the question of liability of the AI's function on the violation of privacy and freedom of expression. The liability should be based on Safe Harbor Principle. The second set of issues he discussed was economic issues. Just like in capitalism, the ones that had capital could exploit other people making people depend on the use of the capital to create value and as robots start providing label that replace human label, there will be more inequality. Anther issue he raised was the use of algorithm. Algorithm might be biased due to adaptation of the culture, language and other aspects. The fourth issue, he raised was ethical challenge of AI from data monopoly. A lot of people can have copies of AI. What it makes or breaks is whether you have the data. Who is building the silos of training data? That will also decide resource allocation and resource distribution. So these are the challenges. Prof. Park also argued that AI is a just technology and do not need a specific law. However, to avoid data monopoly, there could be more legislative initiatives that encourage people to share more data but equitably.
To sumarrize the workshop, it is agreed that AI is basically a technology and it could be governed by ethical approach and inclusive design. It is also agreed that the data used is significant and it should be neutral for the use.
