(Image: Dell Technologies)
Michael Dell has played down fears of artificial intelligence[1], saying AI will remain domain-specific for some time.
Speaking to journalists at Dell Technologies World, the eponymous chairman and CEO said a mindset of fearing new technology because of its drawbacks would have seen technology stop with fire and the wheel.
"Every technology creates good and bad," he said. "You can sit here and say, 'AI is really bad, we shouldn't have AI' -- that's nonsense. We have to figure out how to use it in a responsible way, that's our job.
"If you hold something back that's really powerful and good, fundamentally, it's like mostly good, that's just not going to work."
Dell said it is the responsibility of the technology industry to ensure AI is used for good purposes.
"These are powerful tools, but that's really all they are," he said.
See: What is AI? Everything you need to know about Artificial Intelligence[2]
Citing past predictions that technology would spell doom for the world, Dell said that future had not to come to pass, and AI would be a force for good.
"I believe we are going to have mostly very good stuff, there'll be some bad people ... there's always 1 or 2 percent that are really bad," the CEO said. "We've got to figure out how to stop them."
While optimistic on the positive impacts of AI, Dell believes the technology will remain constrained to specific domains for some time.
"When you get into a specific business, the way the data is used is incredibly vertical. So there isn't one vertical software solution that is going to solve all