Business Leaders Discuss the Potential and Perils of AI at TIME100 Impact Dinner

Business leaders considered the future of AI at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, during the TIME100 Impact Dinner Tuesday night.

The panel, ”From Vision to Velocity — Deploying Innovation at Scale,” delved into the ways AI has been integrated into industries from health care to energy, and some of the biggest challenges it may present down the road.

Noubar Afeyan, the co-founder and chairman of Moderna and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, said that Moderna has been using machine learning techniques to make medical advancements for quite some time, citing the development of COVID mRNA vaccines.

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“In tech, we always watched with envy the ability to move quickly, because pharmaceuticals have never been programmable,” Afeyan said. “For the first time in 2020 the world saw programmable medicine. But we haven’t stopped at that.”

He also asserted that AI will become crucial in understanding the nature in and around us—but cautioned that people may not be ready for what that insight “will do to our humanity and to our self image.”

“​​I would contend that what we’re about to find out, based on the application of artificial intelligence to nature, is that nature is a whole bunch of forms of intelligence, and we never realized it. Every tree, every virus, every immune cell, these are forms of intelligence,” he said, adding, “I think the safety, maybe security challenge to humans—or, let me put it this way, insecurity challenge to humans—is going to be that we’re going to have to adjust our image of ourselves and realize that with machine intelligence and with nature’s intelligence, we can improve how we can manage nature, how we can extract value from food … new medicines, how to prevent disease.”

Executives of two of India’s leading renewable energy companies, ReNew Energy co-founder Vaishali Nigham Sinha and Greenko Group President Mahesh Kolli, spoke about the changing energy industry amid AI’s growing demand for power.

Kolli discussed the developing role of what he called “electro-states,” countries that have shifted to electrical energy and clean sources, like solar or wind, and away from traditional methods such as oil. 

“What we’re seeing in India is that kind of electro-state revolution,” he said about the country’s use of clean energy going from “a power source for electricity to households” to “now becoming a source to make materials, molecules, and AI,” a shift he said is driving India’s competitive position within a global market and that of other advanced electro-states like China.

Speaking about the potential implications of AI’s rise on the effort to combat climate change, Sinha urged collaboration between countries.

“When we talk about the climate agenda, we’re talking about the world at large. And for that, countries will have to work together because climate really doesn’t know boundaries,” she said, adding that public and private partnerships are “required” to make strides across sectors, “especially in clean energy.”

Siemens Chief Technology and Strategy Officer Peter Koerte ended the panel discussion by offering a warning about the threat AI could pose to the job market. He referenced the ways technology has already taken human jobs throughout history, and noted that this is not the first time rapidly advancing tech has stoked fear in countries’ workforces. 

“AI is doing to the brain workers, meaning the white collar workers, what robots did to the blue collar workers,” he said. 

TIME100 Impact Dinner: From Vision to Velocity — Deploying Innovation at Scale was presented by Andhra Pradesh.