Reporter's Notebook: Marc Benioff of Salesforce Sounds Alarm on Technology
October 17 2019 - 1:58PM
Dow Jones News
By Steven Rosenbush
NEW YORK -- Marc Benioff, co-founder and co-CEO of
business-software company Salesforce.com Inc., told business
journalists Wednesday that it was time to apply much stronger
controls to social media, artificial intelligence and other
technologies.
Mr. Benioff renewed his assertion that Facebook "is the new
cigarettes." He called for the abolishment of Section 230 of the
Communications Decency Act, the 1996 legislation that immunizes an
"interactive computer service" from liability for information that
third parties publish on its platform. The billionaire proclaimed
that "capitalism is dead," while holding out hope for a new form of
capitalism that puts stakeholders on par with shareholders.
He said he was "shocked by resistance" to San Francisco's
Proposition C, which called for higher taxes on businesses to raise
funds for addressing homelessness. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and
Square, is a prominent opponent, arguing the measure is unfair to
Square and fintech startups. San Francisco voters approved
Proposition C in November 2018, though the city has said it won't
spend the money raised until legal questions are settled.
On WeWork, whose plans for an initial public offering were
derailed recently, Mr. Benioff said that "an IPO is like a
spiritual cleanse." That's because going public earlier in its life
forces a startup to do things like find a top CEO, he said. Mr.
Benioff said WeWork founder Adam Neumann, who resigned as chief
executive, is a visionary, "but for sure some issues in the company
got cleansed." SoftBank Group Corp., which owns a third of WeWork,
has prepared a financing package that would give it control.
Mr. Benioff was speaking during an event honoring the
Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism, a
program at Columbia University. He was interviewed on stage by New
York Times Deputy Managing Editor Rebecca Blumenstein, previously a
top editor at The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Benioff entered the news
business himself last year when he and his wife purchased Time
magazine. Highlights:
Ms. Blumenstein: How worried are you about the upcoming election
and misinformation?
Mr. Benioff: Well, I think we all should we be worried based on
what we have seen. You know, unless we are living in a capsule and
not reading anything, which some days, I would prefer to do,
actually. But we should be worried. We should be worried because
there are still a lot of things we don't understand about how the
technology is shaping us, and how the technology is much smarter
than it was even just a couple of years ago. Let me give you an
example, something that is amazing to me....We have a drone that is
flying over the ocean right now....It is run by the University of
California, Santa Barbara. The drone is using advanced artificial
intelligence...some that we developed. And it spots a great white
shark...and then the classification engine also says oh, look, it
is a kids' surfing camp right here. And they were able to call the
beach and have the kids get out of the water.
Now that's the use of AI for good. But technology is never good
or bad. It's what we do with the technology that matters....We are
in this fourth industrial revolution. We all know that. And not
just the information technologies, but the biotechnologies as well.
It is incredible what is going on. But we have to guide the
technology. We have to point it in the right direction. Otherwise
we are going to end up somewhere that we don't want to do.
Ms. Blumenstein: Don't you enable this to a certain extent?
Mr. Benioff: Well, I hope not....Companies can't wash their
hands of what people do with their products. That is a key point of
ethical use. And that is where I think I have had to double down
inside Salesforce over the last year and a half, two years. As our
technology is getting more advanced, how is it being used
ethically? We set up inside our company an office of ethical and
humane use. We hired a top ethicist. We built a network of the top
NGOs and nonprofits in the world...to help guide us. And we have
made a number of decisions around ethical use, including by the
way, we no longer sell military weapons or assault weapons through
our commerce platform. Our team came to us and said this is no
longer something we can do. And we turned that off. That is a tough
decision, by the way. But those are the hard decisions CEOs are
going to have to make. And that is something that we are willing to
do....This is evangelical work."
Write to Steven Rosenbush at steven.rosenbush@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 17, 2019 13:43 ET (17:43 GMT)
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