The great AI puzzle

With AI set to profoundly reshape the human world, we asked experts to opine on what might come next

(Illustration: Nilanjan Das | AI)

AI is a term that seems to be on everyone’s radar but also one of the biggest mysteries in public discourse. We have all been users of AI both knowingly and unknowingly—whether taking the fastest route using Google Search or Netflix throwing up movies that you may like to see based on your recent viewing. But major developments have happened in the past four years caused by a groundbreaking class of AI algorithms—called Generative AI—which are now reading and interpreting text in the ways human intelligence would. It’s a technological apparition that is expected to alter almost every aspect of life as we know it: from work and employment to the global economy, from electoral politics to justice, from defence technology to policing and surveillance, from the arts and entertainment to our most intimate and private information. Both dream and nightmare, fantasy and inevitability, the technological chimera we have apparently whelped has been greeted with as much anxiety as excitement. Will AI replicate and replace us as emotional companions? Will it compromise our privacy and our bearing on truth and reality? Is it an unstoppable engine, plagiarising human creativity?