Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff has described generative AI as a double-edged sword.
He told other world leaders at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, that Artificial Intelligence will create a lot of good things and “not-so-good” things that will be “best discussed with global leaders”.
While describing AI as a human right, Benioff said “AI could be a creator of inequality. It could also be a creator of equality,” he said on Yahoo Finance Live.
The World Economic Forum is holding for the second time after the 2023 AI revolution.
OpenAI released for public use its natural language processing chatbot tool ChatGPT in late 2022, which changed the game of generative AI, pushing Google to release a similar language model, Bard.
Other chatbot tools have found their way into the market and are being put to use in nearly all sectors such as content creation, finance, and taking over some jobs.
And in this year’s gathering for WEF, world leaders are discussing the upsides and downsides of AI, especially its impact on the job market and it could lead to a greater inequality.
While some employers fear that AI could take over their jobs, a lot of others are optimistic that it could be used to complement a lot of tasks at workspaces.
But a recent report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reveals that about 40% of global employment is exposed to AI.
In advanced economies, roughly 60% of jobs are exposed to AI due to the prevalence of “cognitive task” oriented jobs, which AI can do.
The IMF report also says exposure is 40% in emerging markets and 26% in low-income countries.
World leaders have diverse views about the impact of AI.
For the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare (NET) Matthew Prince, “AI is going to change a lot of what we do. I think there’s going to be a lot of displacement of some people’s jobs that are like with almost any technology that comes out.”
But Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says he has seen “a real productivity increase,” especially for coders, “ You can make them higher quality and make them better.”
Content creation has also witnessed productivity boost, forcing Google to modify its policy on AI-generated content.
The World Economic Forum has held a meeting every year since it was founded in 1971.