Sarath Wijesingh President’s Counsel Former Ambassador to UAE and Israel and President Ambassador’s Forum

Sri Lanka  is in crisis

No doubt Sri Lanka is in crisis in all areas may be due to corruption, bribery, nepotism, lack of planning leadership and a vision and proper committed and genuine leadership. Worst out of all may be the inefficiency,corruption,and disorganized form of the government machinery. It is also agreed by all that Sri Lanka is in crisis with econimic downturn, indebtedness to the world and international organizations, lack of progress and developments in any area citizens being inactive and aimlessly criticizing each other and the governance, which are matters  to be debated.

World Trend

AI and digitalisation is the world trend and the need of the hour. Governance is attempting to take the country toward this destination in making few appropriate appointments including the appointment of Dr Hans Wijesuriya – one of the most qualified who has let many local and international organization on AI and digitalisation which of course is credit worthy which is indeed a ‘G00D CATCH’’ to the governance in need of experts on varied subjects. But the fact remains whether the prioritises are digitalization or AI or the developments, on agriculture, education,industry and  concentrate on easing the consumers pressure which is rapidly increasing due to high cost of living and lack of productivity.

Give priority to agriculture, productivity, employment generation and eradicate corruption

It is necessary to be in line with the developments in the world and it  is useful to use AI and digitalisation in some form until uplifts the Sri Lankan situation to a certain standard.It is to the credit to the  the people , they have high literary rate and mobile penetration with educated young generation with the exposure to the world with newly acquired knowledge and experience on IT and related subjects spreading successfully in the country with the help of the Internet and mobile penetration to a satisfactory level. Artificial intelligence is conversion of the human knowledge and experience to a digital compressed form in order to perform the duties performed by the human, but it is shown that the artificial* mechanical of artificial intelligence  has not been successful in many ways. Uber has unmanned cars, and many operations are conducted online at distances are machinal form of AI mainly with the help of digitalisation,yet is costly and operational systems are complicate.

It is proper for Sri Lanka to use AI and digitalisation to a certain extent with spending limited resources in a country of crisis and to develop most important sectors in preparation of the digital and AI age reaching in the near future which is the world trend today and good to be patient till then. Sarathdw28@gmail.com (reference empowering the consumer by Artificial Intelligence Lanka web on 7/11/24 )