Why the Generative AI is code red for third world countries.

I have just listened to the keynote address of the CEO of Nvidia Jen-Hsun Huang. In an hour-long talk, it seemed like he has portrayed the future. I am not going to go into the details of his talk. I think the talk will be soon available on public media repositories and everyone will be able to watch it.

I am concentrating on the future of the area I live in and my past students. The primary addressees of this blog are my past students and young colleagues.

Technology, Productivity, and Resources

Due to the advancement in technology, the productivity of an average worker has increased by 61.8% in just the last 30 years, and it has doubled as compared to 60 years. With the introduction of Generative AI, the rate of productivity will increase manifolds. Already the difference in the productivity of workers due to technology has imposed great differences in the first world countries and the rest of the world. This next wave will aggravate the situation drastically. The key difference in the current wave is the tool this wave relies on; high-performance computing and very large AI models.

The nature of the present revolution is centralized as compared to the nature of the computer revolution, which was distributed.

Anyone who could buy a computer could be part of it. For people living in first-world countries, it was easier due to the easy access to experts, but for people living in third-world countries, things were slightly difficult because they had to learn on their own. In the present case, nature is centralized because very few people in third-world countries will be able to access the hardware and software required for the innovation. The ones who could, will likely use it for service rather than for innovation, making the capital flow back to first-world countries.

Impact on Education

The GenAI revolution is based on very expensive hardware and the services offered on the cloud. Both are very expensive. It is impossible to reproduce the same services on cheaper hardware. Which means everyone will have to rely on a handful of providers. The services that are essential for innovation are primarily B2B services. The B2C services are third-tier services that are developed using the B2B services. The B2B services, critical for innovation are also quite expensive due to the costs associated with the hardware and probably other reasons.

In such a situation, the impact on Education is going to be huge. The impact is going to affect every subject but let's take the example of Computer Science. The programming courses third-world countries are accustomed to teaching are going to lose their market value very quickly. Neither the staff nor the operations in these universities are trained to absorb change. They have stagnated for the past 20 years or so. Even if that was not there, an agile staff would require a lot of resources to train themselves and then train other students.

Institutes that have been using pirated Windows for decades, are they going to buy licenses for GPT 4 or Omniverse?

Generative AI-based tools are now going to be part of each innovation. Each field of industry whether it is related to generating new component designs, creating new medicine, creating new electrical circuits, devising new materials, or designing production lines, everything will be affected by the Generative AI services.

Generative AI will not replace humans with machines, but it will replace humans that do not know how to use Generative AI services with the ones who do.

Given all of the above, the decision-makers of third-world countries should take heed, because vast portions of their populations are going to be directly affected by these changes. The socioeconomic impacts of large swaths becoming jobless and hence hopeless are going to be drastic, not only locally, but also globally.