Moving with the world amidst regressive laws
President Ranil Wickremesinghe was asked by an undergrad in Jaffna during his recent tour of the Northern Province why most of their syllabus is in the English language and whether these books cannot be translated into the local languages.
A populist leader would usually respond by saying he would promise that, but the President urged the student and her colleagues to learn international languages, especially English, because the world was moving towards a universal community speaking one uniform language, and that would be English. Earlier, Members of Parliament with a short-sighted eye on their next re-election voted against a Council of Legal Education move to have the curriculum for law students shifted to English.
The President said the new world was embracing Artificial Intelligence (AI) with great enthusiasm and an equal measure of trepidation, but countries around the non-English-speaking world, including China, are brushing up on their English language skills so that they could get ahead of others in the AI field.
At Davos, Switzerland, this week, where the world’s captains of industry and political leaders met to exchange ideas on the world economy, the subject of AI was very much at the forefront of discussion. The IMF’s CEO, Kristalina Georgiana, said they had done a sample survey of countries that were preparing for the arrival of fullblown AI and found that the economically advanced nations (this included Singapore) were ready to meet its challenges and benefit from it, but the poorer countries—those in the Global South—were at the bottom of the list.
She said that in their estimates, at least 40 percent of the existing jobs in the world would be affected by the advent of AI, and as much as 60 percent in developed countries. Sri Lanka, as a country that exports labour to rich countries and relies so heavily on their remittances to pay for its imports, is bound to be in for a future shock once AI invades the world labour market. What measures are being taken on the brink of this technology revolution?
The IMF chief also warned that, internally, AI would stoke social tensions even further when those who can access the benefits from AI would have greater advantages over those without such access. Already, professional associations have begun discussing the availability of AI and the radical changes it will make in their respective fields, like medicine, law, engineering, IT, etc.
And yet, while the futuristic President sees the inexorable currents of the new technology in motion, his government is under fire for recommending questionable laws, like the one on online safety. Though a necessity due to the abuse of the internet by anti-social and criminal elements, the drafters of the proposed law locally have exploited that necessity to further their political agendas by slipping in regressive anti-democratic provisions with vague definitions. They have presented a bill mismatched with a presidential worldview and an entire world that is moving in a different direction.