With great AI power comes great skilling responsibility

Hindustan Times

2 days ago

There was a time when power meant scale. Armies, empires, institutions. Today, a single person with a laptop and internet access can move markets, generate headlines, influence public discourse, or build tools that touch millions of lives. With AI, that power is multiplying fast. AI (Representational Image)(Pixabay)
We are now in a world where one person's skill can ripple through entire systems. A line of code, a prompt, or an automation script can decide who gets a loan, how a company is run, or how a generation learns to think. This is not science fiction. It is the present.
The question is no longer whether AI will change the world. It already is. The real question is who will shape that change.
That answer begins with how we skill people. Just like AI needs quality training data, people need quality thinking.
AI skilling has often been treated as a technical milestone. Learning how to write better prompts, use a new model, or automate a repetitive task. All of that is useful. But if that is where it stops, we are missing the bigger picture.
The people who use AI are not just executing tasks. They are making choices. They decide what gets automated, what is left out, and who is affected. And if they do not have the right awareness, even good intentions can lead to harm.
This is why we need a different kind of skilling. One that builds judgment, not just speed. One that encourages people to ask:
Should I be doing this?
Do I understand how this model was trained?
What happens if it gets something wrong?
These are not technical questions. They are questions of intent. They come from reflection, from exposure, from learning to pause before building.
And India, in particular, cannot afford to get this wrong.
We have the world's largest youth population, a fast-growing digital economy, and an enormous appetite for AI and automation. But scale alone does not create readiness. Not if we are teaching people how to use tools without helping them understand the weight of what they are creating.
This is not just about job-readiness. It is about decision-readiness.
Consider a chatbot trained to give mental health advice. It is launched in a regional language, without oversight. One day, it gives dangerous advice to someone in distress. Not because of bad intent, but because no one tested it well enough.
Or a resume screening tool built on data from a single metro. It starts excluding candidates from smaller towns, different backgrounds, or non-English-speaking schools. Quietly. Repeatedly.
Or a deepfake tool used for a prank. A video goes viral. Reputations are damaged. Lives are affected. And the person behind it does not understand what line they crossed.
These are not failures of code. They are failures of context.
And they could have been prevented with better skilling. Not just technical training, but education that includes ethics, systems thinking, real-world exposure, and long-term consequences.
This is India's opportunity. We already have the numbers. What we need is a generation that understands the responsibility that comes with building and using AI. A generation that is not just AI-literate, but AI-conscious.
We often wonder if humans can keep up with AI. But maybe the more urgent question is whether our judgment can grow fast enough to use AI well.
Because the tools will keep getting smarter. They will get cheaper. They will spread faster than anyone expects.
But what they end up doing will still depend on the people behind them.
Skilling, in this moment, is not just about employment. It is about values. It is not just an economic need. It is a civic one.
And how we teach, what we teach, will define far more than who gets hired next.
This article is authored by Raghav Gupta, founder, Futurense.