Tamil Nadu to unveil a policy for ethical use of Artificial Intelligence

In a first of its kind in India, Tamil Nadu is all set to unveil a policy for safe and ethical use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Tamil Nadu e-Governance agency executes cost-effective governance projects using frontier technologies such as machine learning, drones, augmented reality, among others. The Government shall also release a rule book for state agencies and vendors who use AI for governance services, to ensure that private individual data is utilized in a sensitive manner. According to a government official, the policy will be released along with the blockchain and electronics hardware policy in about three weeks.

Government departments will be increasingly making use of AI. A matrix has been created which will indicate if the AI is used in a safe and ethical way. Ethical implementation of AI goes beyond data privacy.

According to Anindya Chaudhuri, Senior Economist with the Global Development Network, a Delhi-headquartered network of policy institutes, there are two aspects as far as the question of ethics in AI is concerned — explicability and constitutional validity. He further said that one of the central problems with AI algorithms is that they suffer from ‘Explainability Problem’ which means that there's a black box between the input and the output.

The e-governance agency has held consultations with private software firms, government departments, and citizen groups to roll out the policy. The agency had earlier partnered IIT Madras’ Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence with impact areas such as education, health and agriculture.