AI: One earth, one regulatory ecosystem

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, built on predictive and deterministic analysis of large data sets and patterns, transcend geographies.

- PALLAVI BAJAJ

AI is inherently collaborative, inclusive, agile, and continuously evolving. Naturally, regulation of AI would need to be, too. Regulatory sandboxes cannot cater to ensuring that the inter-connected, fast-evolving AI benefits all, with minimal risks, globally. Cooperation is essential.

India, with 1.4 billion people, and exponentially increasing digital adoption, will play a key role in this discussion. The benefits of AI extend across domainseconomic, social, health, logistics, education, security, and environment. Evidently, the pace and manner of its adoption into everyday activities is unprecedented. A significant dampener to this adoption is inadequate regulation, encouraging misuse, and impacting user confidence. Risks to security-human, national, economic, social-posed by unregulated advancement and accessibility of AI, are evolving with technology, impacting all stakeholders.

Stakeholders make data - the spine of AI. The larger, more diverse, more inclusive the dataset, the lesser the opportunity for unintended bias, more accurate the assessment and outcome. This makes AI assessment inherently collaborative, inclusive, and cross-jurisdictional, with user confidence critical to its enhancement, and associated risks ubiquitous. The need for collaborative regulation to minimise risks while optimising uptake and enhancement follows naturally.

The current global scenario where AI regulation is fragmented in individualistic sandboxes is sub-optimal.

The race for regulatory "leadership" is counter-intuitive.

There cannot be a legitimate first-mover advantage when effective regulation naturally necessitates cross-jurisdictional collaboration.