Warren Buffett Warns About AI's Potential Dangers | Berkshire Hathaway 2024

[Transcript]

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, Joe, visiting from San Francisco. How do you think about the role of technological advances, especially generative AI, on more traditional industries? Thank you.

WARREN BUFFETT: I don’t know anything about AI, but I do have — that doesn’t mean I deny its existence or importance or anything of the sort. And last year I said you know that we let a genie out of the bottle when we, when we developed nuclear weapons, and that genie has been out doing some terrible things lately. And the power of that genie is what, you know, scares the hell out of me. And under that I don’t know any way to get the genie back in the bottle.

And AI is somewhat similar. It’s partway out of the bottle, and it’s enormously important, and it’s going to be done by somebody. So we may wish we’d never seen that genie, or it may do wonderful things, and I’m certainly not the person that can evaluate that. I probably wouldn’t have been the person that could have evaluated it during World War II, whether we tested a 20,000-ton bomb that we felt was absolutely necessary for the United States, and would actually save lives in the long run.

But we also had Edward Teller, I think it was, who was on a parallel with Einstein in terms of saying, you may, with this test, ignite the atmosphere in such a way that civilization doesn’t continue. And we decided to let the genie out of the bottle, and it accomplished the immediate objective. But whether it’s going to change the future of society, we will find out later.

Now, AI — I had one experience that does make me a little nervous, and I’ll just explain it. Very recently, I saw an image in front of my eyes on the screen, and it was me, and it was my voice. And wearing the kind of clothes I wear, and my wife or my daughter wouldn’t have been able to detect any difference. And it was delivering a message that in no way came from me.

When you think of the potential for scamming people, if you can reproduce images that I can’t even tell are fake that say, “I need money, you know, it’s your daughter, I’ve just had a car crash. I need $50,000 wired.” I mean, scamming has always been part of the American scene, but this would make me, if I was interested in investing in scamming, think it’s going to be the growth industry of all time, and it’s enabled in a way — you know, obviously AI has potential for good things, too, but I don’t know how you — based on the one I saw recently, I practically would send money to myself over in some crazy country. (Laughter)

So I don’t have any advice on how the world handles it because I don’t think we know how to handle what we did with the nuclear genie. But I do think, as someone who doesn’t understand a damn thing about it, that it has enormous potential for good, and enormous potential for harm. And I just don’t know how that plays out.
 

Source: https://buffett.cnbc.com/2024-berkshire-hathaway-annual-meeting/

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