[Mission 2023] INSIGHTS DAILY CURRENT AFFAIRS + PIB SUMMARY 12 January 2023

GS Paper 1

Indian Culture – Salient aspects of Architecture from ancient to modern times

Source: IE

Direction: The article discusses the design and planning of Chandigarh in the backdrop of a recent SC order to take a number of actions to preserve Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh.

Context:

• The SC directed the Centre and the UT administration to take a number of steps to preserve Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh.
• It prohibited fragmentation/ division/ bifurcation/ apartmentalisation of a residential unit in Phase­ I of Chandigarh.

Background:

• The case dealt with The Chandigarh Apartment Rules, 2001, as per which it was permitted to subdivide single residential units into more than one apartment.
• Though repealed in 2007, the same was reintroduced in the Draft Chandigarh Master Plan-2031.

The SC’s observations:

• It is necessary to strike a proper balance between sustainable development and environmental protection.
• Directed the Legislature, the Executive and the Policy Makers at the Centre and at the State levels to take note of the damage to the environment on account of haphazard developments.

The architectural history of the city of Chandigarh:

• The city of Chandigarh was created to hold the potent promise of creativity and potential.
• Its scale and site were decided at the national level, not at the local administrative level.
• In 1949, then PM Jawaharlal Nehru brought in American architect-planner Albert Mayer and Polish architect Matthew Nowicki to plan a modern city.
• They envisioned superblocks with green spaces that were sensitive to the land’s natural gradient and allowed for drainage and water.
• However, after Nowicki’s death, Swiss-French architect-planner Le Corbusier was commissioned for the project.

Feature of Corbusier’s architectural plan:

• The theme of his planning: ‘Care for the body and spirit’. This would fulfil four functions – living, working, movement and recreation.
• A rectangular grid that would privilege the automobile.
  • This encouraged self-sufficient units, dividing the city into different sectors.
  • The residences fell into 13 categories based on the rank and income of the government officials who would inhabit them.
• Garden City, where high-rise buildings were unacceptable in commercial areas.
• His plan would have a heart, a head and hands.
  • The “head” would contain the Capital Complex, the “heart” the commercial area and the “hands” would host recreational spaces and academic institutions.

Criticism of Corbusier’s planning:

• Eviction of locals and refugees: The city, is to be built in two phases, with Phase I containing Sectors 1 to 30 for 150,000 people, and Phase II containing Sectors 31-47 for a denser population of over 500,000.
  • To accomplish this, roughly 28,000 people were required to leave the land under the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, with the inhabitants remaining as tenants.
• Segregating housing based on income: As a result, wage earners’ placement outside of city borders made it difficult for them to access jobs.

Conclusion: Due to the exclusion of the poor, the city of Chandigarh is known as a well-designed city rather than a well-planned city.

Insta Links:

Post-independence architecture

Mains Links:

Q. How will you explain the medieval Indian temple sculptures that represent the social life of those days? (UPSC 2022)

Prelims Links: (UPSC 2013)

GS Paper 3

Syllabus: Indian Economy and issues relating to Planning, Mobilization of Resources, Growth, Development and Employment

Source: IE

Direction: The article discusses how high inflation can benefit the government’s fiscal calculations.

Context: Even though the high inflation rate of above 6% for most of this fiscal year forced the RBI and the government to take action to bring it under control, this may soon become a blessing in disguise.

The FY 2022-23 fiscal maths has benefited from:

• Strong nominal GDP (which takes into account inflation) growth of around 16% vs budgeted 11%;
• Above target tax collections due to better growth, reopening boost, formalisation, and tighter compliance;
• Pick up in nominal GST collections, which have helped to offset lower RBI dividends, fuel excise cuts, higher subsidies, and divestment miss.

How can this be a blessing for the government?

• The fiscal deficit is expected to be higher in absolute terms by at least Rs 1 lakh crore, but the gains from a rise in nominal GDP (which takes into account inflation) will help in meeting the budget target (4% of GDP).

What will be the effect on Budget 2023-24 maths?

• The disadvantage of this gain would be visible in the next fiscal year when a likely slower growth rate and sluggish tax revenues would harm the government’s budget maths.
• Slower real and nominal GDP growth would occur amid weakening demand conditions, a slowing global economy, and the normalisation of base effects from the pandemic.

Insta Links:

Inflation

Prelims: (UPSC 2013)

GS4/GS3/GS1

 Syllabus: Ethics/Society/ Science and Technology

Source: WEF

Context: In the wake of newly released models such as Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT, generative AI has become a ‘hot topic’ for technologists, investors, policymakers and society at large.

What is Generative AI?

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that involves creating new, original content or data using machine learning algorithms.

• It can be used to generate text, images, music, or other types of media.

What is GPT?

A Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) is a type of large language model (LLM) that uses deep learning to generate human-like text.

• “generative” because they can generate new text based on the input they receive
• “pretrained” because they are trained on a large corpus of text data before being fine-tuned for specific tasks
• “transformers” because they use a transformer-based neural network architecture to process input text and generate output text

Potential of Generative AI:

Uses of Generative AI:

• Create realistic images and animations
  • Text-to-image programs such as Midjourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion have the potential to change how art, animation, gaming, movies and architecture, among others, are being rendered
• Generative AI can be used to compose music and create art
• Create brand logo: E.g. many startups are exploring services like DALL.E2, Bing Image Create, Stable Diffusion, and MidJourney to create their brand logo
• Generate text messagesg. ChatGPT to generate news articles, poetry, and even code.
• AI-assisted drug discovery
• Generative AI can be used to design and control robotic systems
• Automate things e.g. Microsoft-owned GitHub Copilot, which is based on OpenAI’s Codex model, suggests code and assists developers in autocompleting their programming tasks.

Issues Associated with Generative AI:

• Governance: Companies such as OpenAI are self-governing the space through limited release strategies, and monitored use of models, however, self-governance leaves chances for manipulation
• Fear of Job losses:g. automation of tasks that were previously done by humans, such as writing news articles or composing music.
• Reduced need for human cognition:g. young children who will see AI as their friend to do their homework.
• Fear of Societal Bias being replicated by AI
• Issues surrounding intellectual property and copyright: The datasets behind generative AI models are generally scraped from the internet without seeking consent from living artists or work still under copyright
• Fear of Misinformation and Mistrust by manipulation of information, creating fake text, speech, images or video
• Fear of Concentration of Power in the hand of a few companies
• Risks for national security using automated troll bots, with advanced capabilities

Suggestions:

• Need to make generative AI modelsmore transparent, so that the public can understand how and why the model is making certain decisions
• Use of diverse training data, as well as techniques like fairness constraints or adversarial training to mitigate bias.
• Privacy: Ensuring the privacy of people
• Accountable governance esp. of BigTech companies using a designated “AI ethicist” or “AI ombudsman”
• Designing a system wherein humans make the final decision and AI can be used as a support system
• Collaboration with civil society and policymakers: To mitigate the impact of Generative AI on -the disruption of labour markets, legitimacy of scraped data, licensing, copyright and potential for biased or otherwise harmful content, misinformation, and so on.

Conclusion:

While generative AI is a game-changer in numerous areas and tasks, there is a strong need to govern the diffusion of these models, and their impact on society and the economy more carefully.

Insta Links

Editorial:

Generative AI

AI and Robotics

Mains Links

 Ethics Case Study:

We’ll probably look back on 2022 as the year generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) exploded into public attention, as image-generating systems from OpenAI and Stability AI were released, prompting a flood of fantastical images on social media. Last week, researchers at Meta announced an AI system that can negotiate with humans and generate dialogue in a strategy game called Diplomacy. Venture capital investment in the field grew to $1.3 billion this year, according to Pitchbook, even as it contracted for other areas in tech.

The digital artist Beeple was shocked in August when several Twitter users generated their own versions of one of his paintings with AI-powered tools. Similar software can create music and videos. The broad term for all this is ‘generative AI’ and as we lurch to the digital future, familiar tech industry challenges like copyright and social harm are re-emerging.

Earlier this month, Meta unveiled Galactica, a language system specializing in science that could write research papers and Wikipedia articles. Within three days, Meta shut it down. Early testers found it was generating nonsense that sounded dangerously realistic, including instructions on how to make napalm in a bathtub and Wikipedia entries on the benefits of being Caucasian or how bears live in space. The eerie effect was facts mixed in so finely with hogwash that it was hard to tell the difference between the two. Political and health-related misinformation is hard enough to track when it’s written by humans.

1. 1. What are the ethical issues in the above case?
   2. Can we have ‘ethical AI’?
   3. Suggest measures that must be taken to prevent moral damage that can from AI.