Microsoft president Brad Smith predicts AI will be as transformative to society as the combustion engine over the next 3 decades

Microsoft president Brad Smith has predicted that artificial intelligence will transform society in the next three decades, just as the internal combustion engine did during the first half of the 20th century. Smith was speaking at the Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal on Wednesday, where he discussed the intersection between tech and society. He said: "When we look to the decade ahead, in many respects AI will be a tool of the sort the world has seldom seen before, and hence it can become a weapon as well. When you look back at the first half of the twentieth century, it was a time that was transformed by one invention above all else: the combustion engine. "[The combustion engine] led to the car and the airplane; it led to the truck and the tractor; it changed every part of every economy.