Artificial intelligence not a threat to humanity, says Microsoft CEO in new book

Advances in artificial intelligence should be used to help humans and machines work together, rather than to create competition between them in everything from chess matches to the job market, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Satya Nadella wrote in his new book, “Hit Refresh.”

“The first choices we get to make are choices around the design of AI, and let’s make that first design choice to augment human capability,” instead of seeking ways to have technology replace people, Nadella said in an interview on Monday, a day ahead of the book’s release.

He cited a Microsoft project that uses computer vision to aid blind users as one example. “Our goal should be to find more and more examples of such sort.”

Realising that ideal is going to take a lot of work, he said. Like US President John F Kennedy’s commitment to land the US on the moon in the 1960s, the technology industry and its funders need to set a goal for AI that is “sufficiently bold and ambitious, one that goes beyond anything that can be achieved through incremental improvements to current technology,” writes the 50-year-old Nadella.

To get there, he calls for greater cooperation on AI among the influential companies in the industry, including Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker and a player in AI research for more than two decades. “Advancing AI to this level will require an effort even more ambitious than a moon shot,” he writes.