Reflections for AI from the food industry

We are all watching the AI drama unfold. One day we are told it will cure every disease; the next, that it will extinguish our species. Having spent four decades in the food industry, I cannot shake the feeling of having seen this movie before. AI is walking along the path of an older revolution, one that India knows better than most.

In the 1960s, serious people predicted that hundreds of millions would starve in the 1970s, and India was the case they pointed to. Then Norman Borlaug bred a wheat that broke the old rules: short, stiff-stalked, disease-resistant and wildly productive. He carried it to the Indian sub-continent, and with MS Swaminathan by his side, put it in our soil. Wheat harvests leapt by some 60 per cent in five years. A region bracing for famine fed itself instead. The Green Revolution is credited, by many accounts, with saving on the order of a billion lives worldwide.