Davos 2017 in quotes: Tech CEOs debate fourth industrial revolution

The founder of China’s largest ecommerce platform Alibaba warned of the disastrous consequences of an upcoming trade war between China and the USA. Ma criticised the tendency of American money to return to Wall Street or Silicon Valley rather than being redistributed evenly. “IBM, Cisco, Microsoft made tens of millions, the profits they’ve made are much more than the four Chinese banks put together,” Ma said. “But where did the money go?”

Ma also suggested the way American businesses operate is short-sighted, describing Amazon as an “empire” but saying Alibaba wants to “build an ecosystem and help other companies grow to be the next Amazons”.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he was “surprised” about how quickly artificial intelligence is developing. “This kind of revolution in deep nets has been very profound and definitely surprised me, even though I was right there,” he said. “It’s an incredible time. What can these things do? We don’t really know the limits.” Brin admitted that his background in __computer science in the 90s led to him discounting AI as a viable technology, but now it “touches every single one of our main projects”.

He went on to discuss the potential impact of advances in AI in society, and said that he hoped developments could alleviate mundane tasks, and that it will enable people to find “more creative and meaningful ways to spend their time”.

Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella also talked of the impact AI could have on society. He referenced Rousseau’s ‘social contract’, suggesting that a mass consensus needs to be reached on how to navigate the changes advances in AI will have on society. For Microsoft’s part, Nadella said: “We should do our very best to work in helping train people for the jobs of the future. None of us can sit here and predict all these jobs, but the lump of labour fallacy will be disproven, there will be new jobs. But how do we know what are the skills? This is where we need new breakthroughs.”

Although HPE CEO Meg Whitman said that technology had helped to lift much of the world out of poverty, she also warned that people are beginning to feel left behind – and this will only continue if there’s political and economic inaction on automation.

She said: “It’s up to leaders in this room to think: ‘how do we help manage the transition of people who have been disrupted by robotics or automation’? Which, by the way, is a far bigger cause of job losses in the US than economic globalisation.”

IBM chief executive Ginni Rometty conceded that some jobs will be lost with the onset of automation. But she insisted IBM’s vision for AI – what the company calls cognitive computing – is more about augmenting existing human tasks and labour rather than replacing it outright.

“Odds are, there are some jobs that will be wholly replaced by automation,” she said, before adding that “most of us, will be working with these systems”.

And what about the social impact? To Rometty, the most important factor is in cultivating the right skills to cope with the change. Her particular catchphrase is ‘new collar workers’ – and that “skills is the issue of our time”.