"If I Can Keep Up In Family Dinners, I Can Handle Summits": Rishi Sunak At NDTV AI Summit

Rishi Sunak, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, spoke at length on India's potential in the field of artificial intelligence or AI, saying the country is "well positioned to take a leadership role". 
About how the way ahead should be handled and political leaders bring about a convergence between AI companies interests and the needs of the society, he said it was about trusting technology and the politicians' ability to grasp the matter. 

In this context, speaking to NDTV CEO and Editor-in-Chief Rahul Kanwal at the channel's AI Summit, he recounted an anecdote.

"To my parents' great disappointment, I didn't have a STEM degree, which they were sad about... it was something that my team brought up when we hosted that first summit, and we were inviting all the leading frontier labs and we were going to have these conversations," Sunak said.

It was there that one of the engineers made the same point, he said.

"It was like, are you going to be able to really keep up with the technical discussions that are going to happen here? And I said to this person, I said, 'You know what? My wife's uncle is an astrophysics professor at Caltech, my mother-in-law was one of the first female engineers at Telco, my brother-in-law is a computer scientist, and my father-in-law founded a software company. I said, 'If I can keep up with them at family dinner, I can probably handle the summit discussions'," he said. 

Sunak is married to Akshata Murthy, the daughter of NR Narayana Murthy -- the co-founder of the Indian IT giant Infosys - and Sudha Murthy. 

"If I look around the world, there are varying attitudes towards AI," Sunak said. 

"I think here in India, there's enormous optimism and trust, whereas in the West, I think the dominant feeling is one of anxiety. And I think closing that confidence gap is now not just a technical issue, but it is a policy issue," he said.

While the matter will be resolved only in the public sector, the way ahead, he said, will involve winning the trust of the people.
"I think when citizens experience themselves better healthcare, faster government services, a more efficient interaction with the state, I think that's when this debate about trust in AI goes from abstract to reality, and that's how you can win people over to trusting the technology," he said. 

In India, AI is supported by "a very deep talent pool... a strong digital public infrastructure, and a public that's very supportive and optimistic of technology, I think India is well-positioned to take a leadership role in AI".