AI should guide decisions, not replace judgement

Shas­tri Boodan

Ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence should help peo­ple make in­formed de­ci­sions, not re­place their abil­i­ty to think crit­i­cal­ly, ex­er­cise sound judge­ment and dis­tin­guish truth from mis­in­for­ma­tion.

That was the mes­sage from Dr Van­dana Di­vya Jyothi Per­sad, who de­liv­ered the fea­ture ad­dress at Sun­day's Di­vali Na­gar cel­e­bra­tions, un­der the Na­tion­al Coun­cil of In­di­an Cul­ture's (NCIC) theme, Vivek – dis­cern­ing truth in the age of AI.

“Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence is no match for nat­ur­al stu­pid­i­ty,” Per­sad told the au­di­ence, warn­ing that peo­ple risked us­ing tech­nol­o­gy to re­in­force ex­ist­ing be­liefs rather than chal­lenge their think­ing.

She cau­tioned that AI-gen­er­at­ed in­for­ma­tion could be out­dat­ed, in­ac­cu­rate or mis­lead­ing, even when pre­sent­ed con­fi­dent­ly.

Per­sad said med­ical pro­fes­sion­als could not au­to­mat­i­cal­ly ac­cept every­thing pub­lished in sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals, but had to as­sess the qual­i­ty of re­search, method­ol­o­gy and find­ings be­fore de­ter­min­ing whether they were rel­e­vant to pa­tients.

She cit­ed the on­go­ing de­bate sur­round­ing flu­o­ride as an ex­am­ple of why peo­ple should ex­am­ine sci­en­tif­ic ev­i­dence rather than ac­cept the first ar­ti­cle re­turned by an on­line search.

“In­for­ma­tion is not nec­es­sar­i­ly knowl­edge. Knowl­edge is not nec­es­sar­i­ly un­der­stand­ing. And hav­ing an an­swer does not nec­es­sar­i­ly mean you have the right an­swer,” she said.

Per­sad al­so ex­am­ined how tech­nol­o­gy and so­cial me­dia in­flu­enced per­son­al iden­ti­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly the ex­pec­ta­tions placed on women.

She said so­ci­ety of­ten pre­scribed a se­quence for achiev­ing suc­cess, from ob­tain­ing aca­d­e­m­ic qual­i­fi­ca­tions and es­tab­lish­ing a ca­reer to get­ting mar­ried and start­ing a fam­i­ly. So­cial me­dia had in­ten­si­fied those pres­sures by ex­pos­ing peo­ple to care­ful­ly cu­rat­ed por­tray­als of oth­er peo­ple's achieve­ments and lifestyles.

Re­flect­ing on her ex­pe­ri­ence in health­care man­age­ment at the fam­i­ly-owned San­ji­vani Women's Hos­pi­tal, Per­sad ac­knowl­edged that tech­nol­o­gy had helped stream­line op­er­a­tions, analyse per­for­mance and as­sist with fi­nan­cial au­dits.

How­ev­er, she stressed that tech­nol­o­gy could not re­place the in­tegri­ty and ac­count­abil­i­ty re­quired in lead­er­ship.

“I can del­e­gate tasks to tech­nol­o­gy. I can­not del­e­gate in­tegri­ty,” she said.

She al­so high­light­ed se­wa, or self­less ser­vice, as an im­por­tant ex­pres­sion of faith, warn­ing against be­com­ing so fo­cused on ef­fi­cien­cy and au­toma­tion that the hu­man el­e­ment of work was over­looked.

Link­ing her mes­sage to Di­vali, Per­sad said the fes­ti­val's cel­e­bra­tion of light over dark­ness, good over evil and knowl­edge over ig­no­rance should ex­tend be­yond the an­nu­al ob­ser­vance.

She urged peo­ple to prac­tise kind­ness, hon­esty and com­pas­sion in their every­day lives.

“The light we cel­e­brate dur­ing Di­vali should not sim­ply be some­thing we il­lu­mi­nate our homes with. It should be some­thing we car­ry in­to the way we live, the way we treat peo­ple and the de­ci­sions we make every sin­gle day,” she said.

Per­sad said peo­ple's great­est strength would re­main their abil­i­ty to dis­cern truth, recog­nise what was right and act with com­pas­sion.

“AI may help us find an­swers. But it is Vivek that helps us de­cide which ques­tions are worth ask­ing, which an­swers are worth trust­ing and what we choose to do with the knowl­edge we ac­quire,” she said.