Robot gets seat at boardroom table
DAVOS, SWITZERLAND — Marc Benioff, chief executive of the software company Salesforce, consults a regular guest at his senior-level meetings: a robot that doesn’t hesitate to correct error-prone humans, he told an audience in Davos this week.
The AI robot, called Einstein, has had a seat at the table for about a year.
“I ask Einstein, ‘I heard what everybody said, but what do you actually think?’” Benioff said at the World Economic Forum, the annual gathering which brings together business and political leaders.
The robot recently raised doubt about one of his European employee’s strategies, saying, “I don’t think this executive is going to make their number — I’m so sorry,” Benioff recounted in a tweet. Then the robot described the flaws it saw in the employee’s thinking.
The effects of automation on the workforce has been a key topic for leaders meeting in Davos this week.
A Forum report on the eve of the meeting warned automation could displace workers on a global scale and alter the nature of work across a variety of roles, exacerbating poverty and inequality.
“Automation has already been a disruptive labour-market force, and its effects are likely to be long-lasting as new technologies diffuse throughout the global economy,” the authors wrote. “For the foreseeable future, automation and digitalization can be expected to push down on levels of employment and wages, and contribute to increases in income and wealth at the top of the distribution.”
An IMF report last year warned that 53 per cent of countries had experienced an increase in income inequality over the last three decades, and the gap was widened the most in large countries such as China, India and the U.S. The Forum report said this trend is partially driven by technology knocking people out of work and fattening the pockets of the world’s richer citizens.
Popular fears about workers being entirely displaced by robots are overblown, said David Autor, an MIT economist who attended a discussion about worker retraining this week. Instead the challenge will be helping workers adjust to how automation changes the quality of jobs, he said.
“This concern about the future — ‘will there be jobs?’ — is misplaced,” Autor said “There’s no evidence we are running out of jobs. A harder question is whether there will be good-paying jobs.”
Government and business leaders said this week they are actively investing in retraining to help prepare workers for changes in the workplace.
“Without re-skilling, yes, things do look quite dire,” said Saadia Zahidi, head of education, gender and work at the Forum, who helped come up with the idea and will be tracking the companies’ progress. She added that people in declining jobs still do not have the skills needed in jobs with potential for growth.
Benioff, whose company uses artificial intelligence to track customer orders, urged other employers to be more transparent about the technology they plan to adopt so people can prepare for it. “I’m increasingly worried that even as these technologies deliver incredible benefits to some, this wave of change will leave behind hundreds of millions of people around the world and exacerbate the dangerous inequalities that already plague our societies,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal column ahead of the Davos meeting.