-President Ali says; believes training of personnel necessary
PRESIDENT Dr. Irfaan Ali has highlighted the need for the training of security personnel in the areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and digitisation.
The Head of State during an address at an event held last week at the University of Guyana said that the advancement of both AI and digitisation can pose “immense threats” to the country’s “security apparatus.”
“A sophisticated criminal or criminal network can build the same capacity and capability on a digitised platform or an AI platform as a government and give you the same level of service as a government. Now that is scary and that is where the world is going,” the President said.
He added, “This is an important issue and an immense threat to our security apparatus in the future and we have to start addressing it and we have to start understanding what it is and deal with the challenges from it.”
Just last month at the 46th Regular Meeting of the Conference of CARICOM Heads of Government, held in Guyana, President Ali who is also the current CARICOM Chairperson, stressed the need for proper regulations to be developed to manage the use of AI and other developing technologies which are evolving rapidly in the region.
“I believe that the region must work immediately on developing regulations to [manage] the use of AI within this region,” President Ali had said during the opening ceremony the CARICOM summit.
The Head of State said that it will be disastrous if the region does not collectively establish legislation to monitor the use of AI.
“We must have a common rule-based system. Regulations or legislation to deal with AI is going to be disastrous if we do not manage this now and have the infrastructure established to manage it now,” he related.
AI is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. Some specific applications of AI include expert systems, natural language processing, speech recognition, and machine vision.
“We need to develop, urgently, a digital strategy and AI strategy for the region. Because if you are to integrate that digital platform, it must be integrated from conceptualisation to implementation,” President Ali added.
