“Benioff said during the hour-long discussion on “Preparing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

“I think now about how artificial intelligence will create digital refugees and how people will be displaced from jobs, tens of millions of people across the planet, because technology is moving forward so rapidly. . . . So companies, individuals have to decide are we going to be committed to improving the state of the world? We’re at a crucial point right now.”

He said the Fourth Industrial Revolution includes rapid advances in cloud computing, mobile computing, AI, genetic engineering —”all these things are happening all at once.” In just the past few months, AI has moved especially quickly, gaining “the ability for the software to learn more rapidly than we expected,” he said.

When asked by moderator Ngaire Woods, Dean of Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government, what should be done about such digital refugees, Benioff replied, “Throughout history, technology has displaced workers, but then workers have the opportunity to be trained. . . . We need to have start having very serious conversations, multi-stakeholder dialogues, where we bring together corporate leaders, government leaders, social leaders, NGOs. Only through that are we going to get an answer. There is no clear path forward.””

Technology’s frantic speed will create ‘digital refugees’ with no clear fix, Salesforce’s Benioff warns at Davos
https://www.geekwire.com/2017/technologys-frantic-speed-will-create-digital-refugees-no-clear-fix-salesforces-benioff-warns-davos/
via Instapaper