Despite AI Progress, Microsoft's Satya Nadella Doesn't Think Robots Will Take Away All Our Jobs

Where artificial intelligence is concerned, many are justifiably wary of how the technology could affect the job economy. After all, when automated robots can do a job more efficiently and for cheaper than humans, why employ humans at all?

However, it seems that sentiment is not something Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella agrees with. In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, he insisted that robots would never render people completely jobless, even in a ¡°runaway artificial intelligence¡± scenario.

Instead of debating whether or not we need to use AI, Nadella instead believes the conversation needs to be about using it ethically. ¡°What I think needs to be done in 2018 is more dialogue around the ethics, the principles that we can use for the engineers and companies that are building AI, so that the choices we make don't cause us to create systems with bias,¡± Nadella said in the interview. ¡°That's the tangible thing we should be working on.¡±

In fact, that¡¯s something Microsoft is already looking at. According to MIT¡¯s Technology Review, the company is building a to automatically identify bias in various machine learning algorithms. If it works correctly, it could help address a major issue that keeps AI researchers up at night.

¡°Of course, we can¡¯t expect perfection,¡± says Rich Caruna, a senior researcher working on the anti-bias tool. ¡°There's always going to be some bias undetected or that can't be eliminated. The goal is to do as well as we can.¡±