UpFront Blog: The ascent of Artificial Intelligence: How will AI change the nation-state?

Modern day artificial intelligence machines learn and improve themselves based on ever-increasing amounts of data that humans and machines generate with each passing day. This happens largely through supervised learning which is a major branch of Artificial Intelligence. But such machines also make mistakes.

In the new Brookings India Development Seminar, Vasant Dhar, Professor, Stern School of Business, New York University, walked us through various situations in our everyday lives – investing, playing sports, riding in driverless cars, using social media platforms – to encourage us to question the faith we put in technology. He proposed methods to inform executive and policy makers in evaluating the risks associated with data infrastructure initiatives, such as those proposed in his recent Hindustan Times editorial.

Discussant: Anna Roy, Adviser, NITI Aayog, Government of India

Vasant Dhar is a professor at the Stern of School of Business and the Center for Data Science at New York University. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Big Data, and the founder of SCT Capital Management, a machine-learning-based hedge fund in New York City. His recent TEDx talk was on “When do we trust machines?“.