AI for Peace: South Asia's Scope for Cooperation?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the world at an unprecedented pace. However, beyond India's growing AI leadership, South Asian countries are struggling to develop and regulate AI due to a lack of technical skills, research and development, and capital for setting up AI infrastructure.

The European Union (EU) has passed the AI Act, a legal framework to protect private information and data in AI use. But what about other regions? Can South Asian nations collectively leverage their potential in the AI revolution, or will they be left behind? The AI race is driven by economic goals, technological innovation, and geopolitical competition. But it also adds a new layer of anxiety around the uncertainty of its harmful potential to humankind.

The invention of nuclear weapons in the 1930s soon led to the use of atomic bombs for mass destruction in World War II. Since then, the global community has established safeguards in the form of monitoring mechanisms, from the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).

Not surprisingly, policy experts have drawn parallels between nuclear and AI safety, with some referring to the need for a Manhattan Project for AI. Technological developments with AI seem to move faster than policy and regulation for AI safety.

In May 2023, the heads of AI labs OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, as well as researchers like Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio and prominent figures like Bill Gates, signed an open letter stating, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.