CORPORATE, GLOBAL LEADERS PEER INTO A FUTURE EXPECTED TO BE RESHAPED BY AI, FOR BETTER OR WORSE

Last week, President Joe Biden and other global leaders have spent days melding minds with Silicon Valley titans in San Francisco, their discussions frequently focusing on artificial intelligence, a technology expected to reshape the world, for better or worse.

For all the collective brainpower on hand for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference, there were no concrete answers to a pivotal question: Will AI turn be the springboard that catapults humanity to new heights, or the dystopian nightmare that culminates in its demise?

“The world is at an inflection point — this is not a hyperbole,” Biden said at a CEO summit held in conjunction with APEC. “The decisions we make today are going to shape the direction of the world for decades to come.”

Not surprisingly, most of the technology CEOs who appeared at the summit were generally upbeat about AI’s potential to unleash breakthroughs that will make workers more productive and eventually improve standards of living.

None were more bullish than Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, whose software company has invested more than $10 billion in OpenAI, the startup behind the AI chatbot ChatGPT.

Like many of his peers, Nadella says he believes AI will turn out to be as transformative as the advent of personal computers were during the 1980s, the internet’s rise during the 1990s and the introduction of smartphones during the 2000s.

“We finally have a way to interact with computing using natural language. That is, we finally have a technology that understands us, not the other way around,” Nadella said at the CEO summit. “As our interactions with technology become more and more natural, computers will increasingly be able to see and interpret our intent and make sense of the world around us.”