38% Of The Youth In Kerala Are Worried About Job Displacement Due To AI

The Committee on the Welfare of Youth & Youth Affairs, Kerala Legislative Assembly called for opinions from stakeholders on the Opportunities and Challenges presented by Artificial Intelligence (AI). As India’s largest youth media platform, Youth Ki Awaaz (YKA) contributed to this call for opinions and shared our views. YKA led a collaborative effort, along with local partners Citizen Digital Foundation and Tinkerhub Foundation, to curate a submission that presented the need for a holistic approach towards AI in the state of Kerala. 

Unlike the popular mode of expert driven submissions to public consultations, YKA innovatively used its polling platforms to understand the trends in the perception of AI amongst young people in Kerala. YKA ran a pilot poll on the subject of AI, and catered this to the youth in Kerala to understand their opinion on some major questions cornering AI. In the absence of other specific data sources in Kerala, we believe that this data gives us preliminary insights into the perspective of young people in Kerala towards AI and its possibilities and challenges.

To gather these insights, YKA conducted the survey on our independent polling platform as well as used Twitter as a medium to gather responses. All the poll questions on Twitter were targeted to users located in Kerala and have received a minimum of 160 responses each.

The gender disaggregation of this data is skewed, with women’s representation as polltakers being around 14% across questions. We posed five questions to the poll takers. Each question could be answered anonymously, without data being individually disaggregated. 

Poll questions 

Firstly, responders were asked to answer whether they were comfortable using AI for work. A significant majority answered positively, reflecting that young people in Kerala are actively using AI for their professional and personal purposes. Amongst 160 total poll takers across platforms, 41% answered in the affirmative that they feel equipped to navigate work using AI. 39% answered that they feel unequipped to use AI in their work while 20% shared that they were unsure.

The possibilities of AI is a major reason for worry as well as anticipation for many. To understand their idea on what economic benefits they see with AI transformation, the respondents were asked to choose amongst four major areas potential changes that AI can bring. Amongst 255 poll takers across platforms, 26% opined that they anticipate new jobs being created as a result of AI. 22% were looking forward to the creation of new businesses that use AI technology while 13% of respondents said they anticipate a reduction in red tape. A majority of the respondents rounded off to 39% of the total, opined that AI will bring in cost savings across the board through its  application.

Many sectors are predicted to change massively due to the adoption of AI technologies. Popular perception through news media and social media suggest that most people consider education, healthcare, government services and the unorganised labour market to undergo massive  transformation.

The next question asked young respondents in Kerala to share their opinion on the same. An overwhelming majority of 50% believe that the education sector will undergo the most transformation due to AI. 18% of respondents across platforms believe that the healthcare sector will undergo maximum transformation. The unorganised labour sector closely follows this at 17% of respondents seeing maximum change here. Only 15% participants anticipate the government services sector will transform the most due to AI.

To identify the perception of challenges presented by AI, two questions were asked to the respondents. The first question was to identify the primary concern about integration of AI technology in Kerala. At 38%, most of the respondents were worried about the job displacement in the state as AI integration gathers pace. 32% of the respondents are also worried about unethical use of technology as it gets integrated into the state. 15% each of the total respondents are concerned about the privacy implications of the use of AI in the state and operation of AI technologies in a regulatory vacuum respectively. 

The second question was to understand the attitudes of young people in Kerala to the specific challenge of deepfakes. This poll question saw the highest participation with 350 respondents across platforms. 34% responses across platforms identified election manipulation as the biggest worry regarding deepfakes, 28% of the respondents were concerned about the potential of identity theft with deepfakes while 23% of respondents were worried about online fraud at large. 15% of respondents identified the impact on gender violence as the biggest threat posed by deepfakes. It is essential here to reiterate the skew in respondents with less than 15% of respondents being women. 

Finally, the last question addressed the challenge of trust deficit between organisations and the youth on the ethical and responsible use of AI. An overwhelming 50% of the 210 respondents to this question across platforms expressed that they have no trust in organisations to use AI ethically and responsibly. 27% expressed little trust while 12% expressed a fair amount of trust. Only 11% reported to completely trust the organisations to use AI ethically and responsibly.

Connected Recommendations

YKA shared recommendations connected to the poll questions based on the pieces on the platforms as well as subject expertise from the policy team. Some of the key recommendations were as follows. 

1. The Committee should formulate its vision to ensure AI tools are made universally accessible to young people and others alike, with adequate attention paid to making safe and ethical use a practice at different levels including schools, colleges and workplaces to ensure adequate skilling of the workforce.
2. At the policy level, the Committee should urge the creation of a progressive and inclusive ecosystem for innovation in the state to reap the benefits of a confident young population in the incoming AI boom. 
3. The anticipation about the creation of new jobs and new businesses makes it necessary that a responsible ecosystem be created for the development, use and deployment of AI usecases in Kerala. The Committee should champion the availability of resources and adequate protections, such as sandboxes for piloting new usecases to foster innovation while protecting the rights of the citizens of Kerala.
4. AI has been touted to reduce inefficiencies in systems resulting in cost savings. The Committee should ensure that its vision is inclusive so that the benefits of such cost savings can be harnessed without compromising protection of rights when decisions are made using AI. Consequently, the Committee should take a position that will ensure that human oversight should not be completely avoided while using AI applications for decision making. This will ensure that bureaucratic loopholes are not exploited to harm rightfully entitled citizens from accessing services.
5. The Committee should scope out the potential pitfalls in the use of AI in education and nudge curriculum and other developments to support holistic development of young people in the state.
6. The Committee should ensure that not just young people but other stakeholders in the education sector, including teachers, are upskilled to use AI for the benefit of all learners. Assessment mechanisms should also be updated so that AI is used for the betterment of the quality of education.
7. Healthcare remains a pain point for governments across demographics. The Committee should ensure that it formulates a vision that ensures the use of AI in healthcare is done with utmost care and abides to the highest ethical standards.
8. Workers in the unorganised sector should not be forced to be collateral damage for technological advancements. The Committee should ensure that it hears from union and worker leaders and young people in the unorganised sector while it formulates a vision for the integration of AI for the future of the state.
9. The Committee should formulate its vision for AI in the state to ensure that job displacement is minimised through upskilling, reskilling and opening up more avenues for employment.
10. The Committee should ensure that the major concern about job displacement is alleviated through its engagements with other legislative and policy making bodies in the state.
11. The Committee should ensure that it places ethical use of AI at the centre of the vision it formulates for the use of AI for the benefit of young people across the state. It should ensure that it nudges policy formulation across sectors and demographics to utilise a responsible and ethical framework for use of AI and ensure that public confidence in systems and institutions remain unwavering.
12. The Committee should critically evaluate the privacy concerns regarding the use of AI in the potential applications and options for use that it is presented with. It should consider and incorporate individual and group privacy as core ideals to protect in the process of formulating a vision for the use of AI in Kerala.
13. The Committee should take into consideration the regulatory vacuum where AI operates today and urge for changes in state policy towards regulation of AI, for the protection of young people and their interests.
14. The Committee should be cognizant of the potential misuses of AI-generated deepfakes, particularly during elections across levels, including student-elections and local government elections. It should formulate its vision to have protections against such misuses while utilising the benefits of AI applications.
15. The Committee should pay special attention to the potential of deepfake-based identity theft and online fraud, as the threshold for such criminal activity has been lowered. It should formulate its vision to limit the consequences at various levels including creation and distribution. It should also work with other policy making bodies and non-governmental organisations to invest in deepfake detection.
16. The Committee should acknowledge the effects of use of deepfakes to perpetrate gender based violence, and formulate its vision to be inclusive of the different gendered experiences of AI. It should prioritise protection, while collaborating with other policy making bodies and non-governmental organisations to prevent misuse of AI based technologies to perpetrate gender-based violence.
17. The Committee should formulate its vision to ensure that the severe lack of trust in the ecosystem is remedied by bringing together multiple stakeholders and allowing them to interact with each other.
18. The Committee should recommend the establishment of a Kerala Responsible AI Research Lab that can not only convene stakeholders, but also contribute to research and development of AI applications and policymaking around the same. The Lab should also ensure diversity in its composition by involving people from different age groups, subject expertise, educational qualifications and identity markers such as gender, religion, caste and geographical location.