T&T may be at the stage where it is be­hind the eight ball in terms of ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence (AI) trends, but with the right reg­u­la­tions, this coun­try could be­come a hub for AI de­vel­op­ment.

This is the view of Trinida­di­an AI ex­pert Christo­pher Boodoos­ingh, CEO and founder of lo­cal com­pa­ny Wim­co.

“I see a lot of reg­u­la­tions com­ing in across the board al­ready. Eu­rope is set­ting all kinds of reg­u­la­tions. Amer­i­ca is go­ing to come in very soon, and every coun­try is go­ing to lay reg­u­la­tions. You asked me a re­al­ly good ques­tion. How do we get ahead?” said Boodoos­ingh.

“We can get ahead if we set the right reg­u­la­tions, we can in­vite AI com­pa­nies over time. If we’re open to these dis­cus­sions. These com­pa­nies do want friend­ly gov­ern­ments that, kind of like off­shore bank­ing, there will be off­shore da­ta bank­ing, which com­pa­nies will seek out coun­tries that will give the right run­way to do this in the right way.”

Boodoos­ingh said soon­er rather than lat­er most of the world would be adopt­ing AI, as he has al­ready seen part of the tran­si­tion.

“Every­body’s go­ing to or­gan­i­cal­ly use the same ser­vices just like we do when we all go away, and we use Uber Eats, and we all use Uber and we use Airbnb, a ser­vice that, once up­on a time was a nov­el idea, and then it be­came very com­mon to be used. And now AI ser­vices will be com­mon, just like Airbnb,” said Boodoos­ingh, who is a grad­u­ate of the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia where he stud­ied elec­tri­cal en­gi­neer­ing.

In 2021, Wim­co was formed as he recog­nised the po­ten­tial of AI.

He cit­ed ways in which AI will be­come per­va­sive as he ex­plained that soon, every sin­gle in­sur­ance com­pa­ny will use AI bolt-on ac­tu­ary sci­en­tists, and every sin­gle busi­ness, such as banks, will have an AI that does some­thing.

“Every sin­gle com­pa­ny that man­ages se­cu­ri­ty cam­eras will have an AI that that’s check­ing those cam­eras to see if any­thing bad is go­ing on, in­stead of hu­mans, you know, this is go­ing to be AI run­ning on top of every­thing even­tu­al­ly. And Trinida­di­ans will be us­ing it, just like every­body else, but they’re not go­ing to be on top of it, in front of it, man­ag­ing it or own­ing it.”

Boodoos­ingh and Wim­co have been pi­o­neer­ing the de­vel­op­ment of green AI com­put­er in­fra­struc­ture, which is geared to­wards in­creas­ing ef­fi­cien­cy with­in AI sys­tems, and has served as the build­ing blocks that give AI ap­pli­ca­tions such as Chat­G­PT the ca­pac­i­ty to func­tion.

Boodoos­ingh’s work in the field over the past three years saw him in­vit­ed as a guest speak­er at the Nordic Blockchain Con­fer­ence held from June 19 to 20 in Copen­hagen, Den­mark.

He spoke dur­ing the pan­el dis­cus­sion Blockchain and AI, where he show­cased his in­no­v­a­tive work in the in­dus­try as well as dis­cussed po­ten­tial ap­proach­es that could be adopt­ed in Eu­rope.

“The rea­son why I’m here is be­cause Eu­rope has reached the point where they know they’re start­ing to get left be­hind if they don’t do some­thing about this. And I am one of the few (AI) builders that is not out of Amer­i­ca, most­ly guys that build AI are Amer­i­cans in this in­dus­try,” he said.

How­ev­er, Boodoos­ingh not­ed that like Eu­rope, T&T was a step be­hind in terms of in­vest­ing in AI.

“They asked me the same thing, like, why is Eu­rope be­hind? And I told them, just fol­low the mon­ey. I mean, right now 60 cents out of every dol­lar in­vest­ed in AI is from an Amer­i­can com­pa­ny. So of course, Eu­rope is be­hind,” he ex­plained not­ing that the largest in­vest­ments in AI so far came out of the Unit­ed States and Chi­na.

Boodoos­ingh’s talk at the con­fer­ence placed fo­cus on the trans­for­ma­tive im­pact of AI on the busi­ness land­scape across all in­dus­tries.

He stressed that AI is the most in­flu­en­tial tech­nol­o­gy ever. In Boodoos­ingh’s es­ti­ma­tion, AI will have a greater im­pact than the dis­cov­ery of oil or the in­ven­tion of the in­ter­net. 

In par­tic­u­lar, he stressed that AI has the abil­i­ty to repli­cate high-lev­el tasks pre­vi­ous­ly per­formed by pro­fes­sion­als, which could sig­nif­i­cant­ly re­duce labour costs by up to 70 per cent.

This, he ex­plained, has made AI an at­trac­tive op­tion for cor­po­ra­tions seek­ing to boost their bot­tom line by in­creas­ing rev­enue po­ten­tial as com­pa­nies would be less con­strained by hu­man re­sources and the over­heads tied to waged labour. 

“The re­al­i­ty is the mo­tor came around, and we stopped feed­ing an­i­mals, corn, rice, wheat and grain or what­ev­er they need­ed, to get that work done and we start­ed to get it done on mo­tors fed by oil. Well, the ma­chine for in­tel­li­gence has now been cre­at­ed and is now scal­ing (the work­load). Every day there is more and more of them, and even­tu­al­ly, all the jobs that were done by in­tel­li­gent peo­ple are go­ing to get done on AI and the world is just go­ing to have a lot more abun­dance in every­thing,” said Boodoos­ingh, who ad­mit­ted that this tran­si­tion may not be smooth for some but it would cre­ate new op­por­tu­ni­ties for peo­ple to ex­plore.

He al­so ex­plained that reg­u­la­tions would be im­por­tant as AI, while cur­rent­ly hold­ing great po­ten­tial, was very much at the for­ma­tive stage in terms of us­age for good or bad. He said it would re­quire a re­spon­si­ble ap­proach to en­sure that AI is not used in a neg­a­tive or ad­verse way.

“The re­al­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion is AI is ba­si­cal­ly just scal­ing in­tel­li­gence, right! It is what we feed the AI. We are re­spon­si­ble as a hu­man be­ing for what we feed it,” said Boodoos­ingh.

“We are re­spon­si­ble as a care­tak­er of the sys­tem for feed­ing it the right in­for­ma­tion and set­ting the right pa­ra­me­ters. We can make tox­ic prod­ucts if we are tox­ic in­di­vid­u­als, and we can make good prod­ucts if we are good in­di­vid­u­als.

"Just like be­ing a par­ent, it hon­est­ly is the same thing. So let’s just hope that the peo­ple that get the pow­er, are re­spon­si­ble par­ents. Be­cause its just like rais­ing chil­dren. And I’m not re­spon­si­ble for all the par­ents out there, but I am one of them. “

Ear­li­er this month Me­dia In­site’s con­fer­ence “The Pow­er of Per­cep­tion: Me­dia In­tel­li­gence for En­hanced En­gage­ment,” the top­ic of AI, the reg­u­la­tion of AI and its po­ten­tial im­pact on work­ers was raised with Trinidad and To­ba­go Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce Pres­i­dent Ki­ran Ma­haraj urged lo­cal stake­hold­ers to UN­ESCO’s plan to de­vel­op an AI roadmap pol­i­cy.

Ma­haraj said at that event, “I think every­body, every com­pa­ny every CSO, every NGO, every gov­ern­ment en­ti­ty, every­body should be look­ing at that roadmap. That’s be­cause the point here is that if we are not cau­tious as a re­gion, our cul­ture and our con­tents can be mon­e­tised else­where, and peo­ple are go­ing to be out of jobs if it’s done the wrong way.”