Will AI bring about a utopia or kill us all? This cheery debate has been playing out within the AI industry for months, and it was a key topic at Fortune's third annual Brainstorm AI conference this week.
The sold-out event in San Francisco (America's AI capital, to quote Salesforce boss Marc Benioff) featured speakers from a wide range of industries including entertainment, retail, finance, and life sciences, and explored everything from the practical challenges of implementing AI to the deeper philosophical questions.
AI's impact on the workforce was a popular theme that came up in several sessions. Paul Daugherty, the CTO of Accenture, which was one of the conference sponsors, acknowledged that AI will lead to job consolidation, but said the big thing to worry about is what happens to the jobs of people who aren't using generative AI. Khan Academy's Sal Khan gave a taste of what these future jobs might look like in the world of education. He described school teachers liaising with AI tutor bots—the bots work with students on the essay writing process and then provide reports to teachers about areas of strength and difficulty.
On the flip side, Cloudflare CEO and cofounder Matthew Prince, an inveterate contrarian, suggested that for all the hype about AI, it's still too early for most companies to get real value out of the technology. Most companies investing in AI today are just "lighting money on fire," he said.
And of course, there's that existential risk of AI. Longtime Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla gave the optimist's perspective. While the risk of a sentient AI killing us all is not zero, he put the odds at roughly the same level as a humanity-ending asteroid hitting the Earth. A far bigger risk for Americans to worry about, Khosla said, is losing the race for AI superiority to China. |
