Human jobs will survive the robot revolution and artificial intelligence will solve more problems than it will create, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella has said. However, companies should focus on applying technology ethically, Nadella told The Sunday Telegraph in an interview.

“What I think needs to be done in 2018 is more dialogue around the ethics, the principles that we can use for the engineers and companies that are building AI [artificial intelligence], so that the choices we make do not cause us to create systems with bias,” said Nadella. “That’s the tangible thing we should be working on.”

Referring to the question of whether the human labour force will suffer because of robots, Nadella said: “I don’t believe in that lump of labour fallacy, we don’t know all the jobs that are going to be there.”

Systems such as universal basic income may be needed if robots do replace humans, Nadella said. “There is a certain amount of dignity to what is work, so we need to have an incentive system,” he said.