Decked out in purple and plaid, Gwen Stefani belted her 2002 single “Underneath It All” to a packed conference center in San Francisco on Tuesday morning—but she was just the warm-up. At the end of her performance, Stefani shouted “Dreamforce! Let’s go!” into a checkered microphone before Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff strode into the spotlight. Dreamforce is billed as the world’s largest enterprise software conference but feels more like attending a megachurch—especially this year.
\n\nBenioff roamed the audience while delivering his Dreamforce sermon, followed by a teleoperated camera on wheels that beamed his face to screens hanging from the cavernous room’s ceiling. Within minutes, he ordered up a graph of Salesforce’s annual revenue, which the company projects will top $46 billion in 2027, thanks in part to demand for its AI-powered products. The audience applauded. But hanging over the whole event was a dark question: Is artificial intelligence really worth risking all our lives for?
\n\nBetween flashy software demonstrations of agents building dashboards, conference-goers watched Silicon Valley leaders debate whether the AI industry should keep barreling ahead or if the government needs to slow AI progress to prevent catastrophic risks stemming from the technology.
\n\nLast week, AI researcher Jacob Coxon…
Original source: https://www.wired.com/