Berkshire shares surge as Wall Street swoons amid AI fears

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Thomas Kimay (PH) is here. He's a 27-year-old shareholder from Kentfield, California.

And I should preface this question by saying that he was here 17 years ago at 10 years old, asked you a question from the audience asking you if the internet might hurt some of Berkshire's investments.

At the time, you said you wanted to see how things would play out. He's now updated the question. (Buffett laughs)

"What do you think about the implications of artificial intelligence on Berkshire's businesses, beyond autonomous driving and GEICO, which you've talked about already? ...

WARREN BUFFETT: I certainly have no special insights on artificial intelligence, but I will bet a lot of things happen in that field in the next couple of decades, and probably a shorter timeframe.

They should lead, I would certainly think — but again, I don't bring much to this party. But I would certainly think they would result in significantly less employment in certain areas.

But that's good for society.

And it may not be good for a given business, but let's take it to the extreme.

Let's assume one person could push a button and, essentially, through various machines and robotics, all kinds of things, turn out all of the output we have in this country.

So, everybody's — there's just as much output as we have. It's all being done by, you know, instead of 150-some million people being employed, one person.

You know, is the world better off or not?

Well, certainly we'd work a lot less hours a week — of work per week and so on.

I mean, it would be a good thing, but it would require enormous transformation in how people relate to each other, what they expect of government, you know, all kinds of things. And, of course, as a practical matter, more than one person would keep working.

But pushing the idea that way is one of the — you'd certainly think that's one of the consequences of making great progress in artificial intelligence.

And that's enormously prosocial, eventually. It's enormously disruptive in other ways. And it can have huge problems, in terms of a democracy and how it reacts to that...

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, you're painting a very funny world where everybody's engaged in trade. And the trade is, I give you golf lessons and you dye my hair. And that would be a world kind of like the royal family of Kuwait or something.

And I don't think it would be good for America to have everything produced by one person and the rest of us just engaged in leisure.