BOTS WILL BE OUR BOSSES
SoftBank’s $525M A.I. bet
WeWork owner SoftBank is ramping up its investments in artificial intelligence — a move that appears to be tied to its eccentric founder’s obsession with robots taking over the world.
The Japanese conglomerate disclosed plans late Monday to raise $525 million to acquire a private company and take it public via a popular type of publicly traded shell entity known as a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.
The money raised will be used to target a company in the artificial intelligence space, SoftBank said.
“For the past 40 years, SoftBank has invested ahead of major technology shifts. Now, we believe the AI revolution has arrived,” the company said in regulatory filings.
SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son, 63, has long been open about his belief in the singularity, a futuristic theory that predicts robots will one day gain a sentient superintelligence that stands to shake up life as we know it, including through major job losses.
In 2016, Son’s handpicked heir apparent, former Google senior exec Nikesh Arora, announced that he was leaving SoftBank after Son made it clear he would stay on as CEO for at least five more years because he had “unfinished business regarding the singularity.”
By 2017, the idiosyncratic billionaire was predicting that the number of smart robots would match the number of people on earth by 2047, at “around 10 billion” each, resulting in major industry disruptions.
“Every industry that mankind created will be redefined. The medical industry, automobile industry, the information industry of course,” he said in a speech delivered in Manhattan. “Every industry that mankind ever defined and created, even agriculture, will be redefined.”
That same year, he said he planned to invest broadly in the AI sector and gain some influence over how humanity will plan to protect itself from the eventuality of being outnumbered by superior bots.
“I truly believe it’s coming, that’s why I’m in a hurry — to aggregate the cash, to invest,” Son told an interviewer at a 2017 tech conference.
“It will be so much more capable than us — what will be our job? What will be our life? We have to ask philosophical questions. Is it good or bad?”
In 2018, Son reportedly said: “I am devoting 97 percent of my time and brain on AI.” He has even said that the name of SoftBank’s infamous $100 billion Vision Fund refers to his own vision of the singularity and how to get ahead of it.
Monday’s filing suggests that the pandemic has injected a new urgency to Son’s efforts to prepare for the robot takeover. “COVID-19 has pulled this future forward by dramatically accelerating the adoption of digital services,” it reads.