Artificial Intelligence: A Bridge to the Future?

Future/Innovation

Sceptics may dismiss the AI-powered future as naive, but tomorrow’s leaders will use AI, the internet, and robotics to realize the unimaginable

By Baljinder Sharma

Most people don’t understand artificial intelligence, in the way they never understood the internet. Yet, the internet has been instrumental in giving birth to seven of the world’s top ten companies (with a combined market cap of $15trillion). Not only have they contributed up to 30% of the GDP growth in the developed world in the last twenty years but also help overthrow governments in many countries.

The news, last week, that Deepseek, an obscure Chinese startup had released an open-source artificial intelligence, large-language model, promises an even bigger impact on the world economy.

So what’s special about Deepseek? Why is everyone talking about it? What does it mean for the world?

To begin with; it is really cheap – an estimated 95% lower than OpenAI – the current market leader.

Deepseek, in many ways, removes the single most formidable hurdle to adoption of AI – the cost, making it accessible to ordinary individuals, small firms, societies and governments.

Cheap AI, in turn, has the potential to significantly alter the way education, healthcare and other public services are delivered.; but also bring to popular use what was mostly lying in the domain of nerds and experts – early detection of cancer, for example.

AI has a profound bearing on the nature of work as well and the promise of mainstreaming entirely new industries such as smart manufacturing, 3D printing, robotics, biotech, intelligent grids and e-mobility.

Recent experiments at Harvard University, for instance, have concluded that learning gains for students in the AI-tutored classes were about double those for students in the in-class group. Well-conceived AI tutoring could, therefore, solve the problem of ‘lack of teachers’ and ‘physical classrooms’ that consume huge government budgets. It also means hitherto uneducated societies would be able to acquire the same knowledge as others in a shortened time.

Remote Healthcare (including robotics surgery) is now commonplace, but AI’s impact on diagnosis and preventive emergencies is truly extraordinary. In the UK, studies on 350,000 patients who were taken by ambulance to hospital each month found that use of AI could eliminate 80% of those misidentified needs. Using expert AI Agents instead of paramedics – their requirement to be hospitalised could be more precisely determined.

Food abundance underpinned by biotech and near-free energy are within reach. Clearly, neither the biotech nor energy are new – but AI provides the means to supercharge them.

To that, add Innovations such as the Digital Public Infrastructure pioneered by Indian government and you could unleash transparency, enhance public service delivery and lower costs drastically. From pension payments via direct debit transfer to retrieval of land records – the digitisation of government services means 24X7 access and availability at fraction of conventional costs.

One can go on enlisting the merits of AI. The truth is that from preventing crimes to predicting weather to reducing congestion on the roads, to protecting the environment, AI can improve societies in a way that is hard to imagine.

Does that mean we are finally approaching the age of ‘Abundance’ so aptly described by futurist Peter Diamandis?

There is little doubt that the next five years will be radically different from the past fifty.

Deepseek has suddenly compressed years into days and days into seconds. The sheer velocity of automated transactions undertaken by AI agents will lead to double digit growth in national incomes rather than small incremental ones that the world is used to.

Nations will be able to build their own AI Infrastructure based on ‘open-source models’ that countries such as India and China are making available for a song. Or “on a joke of a budget” as one analyst put it.

All knowledge will become common and inexpensive in the process. The average IQ of the world will increase by several points – which could unleash immeasurable productivity.

Given the nature of opportunity that ‘Cheap AI’ suddenly presents, how can the new government that has set many ambitious goals for the country deliver them successfully? To what extent would it be able to help the government honour its promises at a time when the economic situation is ‘catastrophic’? One analyst has projected the cost of implementation at Rs 400 billion. Where will the government find this money?

Sam Altman – the founder of OpenAI, recently announced that PhD Level ‘Super Agents’ capable of performing a range of intellectual tasks across a range of subjects, will be made available ‘very’ soon. These ‘Super Agents’ could do everything from writing legislation to discovering drugs to detecting water leakages to treating patients in hospitals.

Now Imagine if these facilities were available for a low cost (they are already available quite cheaply), Mauritius could begin to use them to write a range of bills that were announced in the government programme last week. No need for expensive lawyers – just smart ones to brief AI Agents and six months of work could be delivered in six minutes. And there are thousands of ways in hundreds of areas in which such path breaking productivity could be achieved – if only one is willing and courageous enough to try them out.

Based on historical data that goes back over three thousand years, Michael Kremer, an American economist, suggests that population size is the key input for how fast your society comes up with more ideas.

Once again imagine if you were able to break away from the threat of population decline that Mauritius faces and begin to deploy AI Agents of the intelligence of Elon Musk or Sundar Pichai at a cost lower than the cost of a factory worker?

Your PlumberGPT will tell you how to fix your drains at home and your EngineerGPT will help you design your roads and bridges that could be built using robotised equipment. This is not some science fiction – China recently built a 156km road in 24 hours using automated construction equipment.

Technology sceptics will dismiss the AI-fed future, as an ‘imagination of the immature’. Yet, the true leaders of tomorrow will be able to use the tools of AI, internet and robotics to make the very future ‘they cannot imagine’ actually come to life.

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 7 February 2025