The Portland utility is one of several owned by billionaire Warren Buffetts Omaha, Nebraska-based investment conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway. The property owners, suing on behalf of a class of thousands of others, alleged that PacifiCorp negligently failed to shut off power to its 600,000 customers during a windstorm, despite warnings from then-Gov. Kate Browns chief-of-staff and top fire officials, and that its power lines were responsible for multiple blazes.

There has been no official cause determined for the Labor Day fires, which killed nine people, burned more than 1,875 square miles (4,856 square kilometers) in Oregon, and destroyed upward of 5,000 homes and structures. The blazes together were one of the worst natural disasters in Oregon history.

In a written statement, lawyers for the plaintiffs called the decision historic and said it paves the way for potentially billions of dollars in further damages for the class members.

PacifiCorp immediately said it would appeal.

Escalating climate change, challenging state and federal forest management, and population growth in the wildland-urban interface are substantial factors contributing to growing wildfire risk, PacifiCorp said in an emailed statement after the verdict. These systemic issues affect all Oregonians and are larger than any single utility.

The Multnomah County Circuit Court jury awarded more than $73 million to 17 homeowners who sued PacifiCorp a month after the fires, with each receiving between $3 million and $5.5 million for physical damage to their property and emotional distress.

The jury also applied its liability finding to a larger class including the owners of nearly 2,500 properties damaged in the fires, which could push the price tag for damages well into the billions of dollars. Those damages will be determined later.

The jury heard testimony Monday afternoon over whether to make PacifiCorp pay punitive damages. Nick Rosinia, an attorney for plaintiffs, told the jurors they should award punitive damages totaling five times what they have already been awarded for the harm PacifiCorp caused.

For its reckless and outrageous action on Labor Day, its the only way they will truly get your message, Rosinia said.

Doug Dixon, an attorney for the power company, insisted no punitive damages were warranted. The company keeps working on safety and was not recklessly negligent, he said. And while lawyers for the property owners described PacifiCorp as deep-pocketed, the company is $9 billion in debt.

Among those in court for the verdict was Rachelle McMaster, whose home in the town of Otis near the Oregon coast was destroyed in the fires. Wearing a tie-dye T-shirt that read keep Earth awesome, she wiped her eyes and clasped her spouses hand after it was read.

The seven-week trial wrapped with closing arguments last Wednesday, Oregon Public Radio reported.

The plaintiffs alleged PacifiCorp was negligent when it didnt shut off its power lines despite extreme wind warnings over the holiday weekend.

They have no real response to any of this, plaintiffs attorney Cody Berne said during closing arguments. (PacifiCorp) started the fires. They destroyed the evidence. And now they have come before you and are asking not to be held accountable.

Jurors were to determine PacifiCorps responsibility in four of those blazes: the Santiam Canyon fires east of Salem; the Echo Mountain Complex near Lincoln City; the South Obenchain fire near Eagle Point; and the Two Four Two fire near the southwest Oregon town of Chiloquin.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs said utility executives kept the power on even as the companys line workers took calls about damaged electrical equipment. The same executives, attorneys said, took no responsibility at the trial, saying it was front-line workers who make de-energization decisions, the news outlet reported.

In his closing arguments, Dixon said alleged power line fires in Santiam Canyon, where more than half the class members live, could not have spread to plaintiffs homes. Plus, PacifiCorp does not have equipment in some areas where they were accused of causing damage, he said.

The risk of wildfires is increasingly fraught for power companies in the West. Pacific Gas & Electric declared bankruptcy and pleaded guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter after its neglected equipment caused a fire in the Sierra Nevada foothills in 2018 that destroyed nearly 19,000 homes, businesses and other buildings and virtually razed the town of Paradise, California.

Toyota Motor Corporations current board chairman, Akio Toyoda, served as president and CEO for almost 14 years, only stepping down earlier this year. Under Toyodas leadership, Toyota rose to be the worlds largest automaker, first achieving that status in 2020. 

But when shareholders convene on Wednesday morning Japan time, several of Toyotas shareholders, like the New York Citys comptrollers office (who manages the citys pension fund) and the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS), will support a measure to oust Toyodawho is the grandson of the companys founderfrom the board.

The reason: Toyotaand Toyodasslow embrace of electric cars. While the company still leads in selling hybrid cars, its only now playing catch-up when it comes to making pure electric vehicles, both to established companies like Ford and General Motors and newcomers like Tesla or Chinas BYD. 

Toyota is failing to lean, like its peers, into a timely transition to an electric fleet, Brad Lander, New York City comptroller, told the Wall Street Journal.

The two pension funds also argue the companys board does not have enough independent directors, and both have voted for a separate resolution calling for greater disclosure of the companys lobbying on climate change. 

While the measure is unlikely to succeed, the Wall Street Journal notes that shareholder revolts, even minor ones, are rare in Japanese corporate culture. Toyoda won renomination to the board last year with 96% of the vote. 

Even in this difficult business environment, Chairman of the Board Akio Toyoda has been strengthening our competitiveness from a long-term perspective, a company spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal.

Toyota and electric cars

Unlike his fellow executives, like Fords Jim Farley or General Motorss Mary Barra, let alone Teslas Elon Musk, Toyoda was a vocal skeptic of electric cars in his final months as Toyotas CEO.

Last December, Toyoda complained that public pressure was stopping executives, who he called a silent majority, from speaking honestly about electric cars as a single option. 

They think its the trend so they cant speak out loudly, he suggested. 

Then, in January, Toyota Motors announced that Toyoda would be stepping down as the companys president, in favor of Koji Sato, then-head of the companys Lexus subsidiary. I am an old fashioned person in regards to digitalization, electric vehicles, and connected cars, Toyoda said at the time. 

Sato took over as president in April, and quickly announced the carmaker would quickly expand its offering of electric cars, releasing 10 new models by 2026. 

Yet investors worry that Toyota still isnt taking the transition to electric vehicles seriously, noting that the company still hasnt given a firm date for when it might have an all-electric fleet. A slow embrace of electric cars also means the company cant capture growing demand for EVs in large markets like China, and also misses out from new subsidies being offered by both the U.S. and the European Union.

Toyotas EV strategy is simply not looking attractive, Anders Schelde, chief investment officer of AkademikerPension, a Danish fund, told the Wall Street Journal.

Crisis of confidence

Worries about Toyotas EV strategy are part of a broader crisis of confidence in the Japanese auto industry.

Earlier this year, China overtook Japan as the worlds largest exporter of cars, in part due to a surge of exported EVs made in the country. Tesla produces half its cars in Shanghai, while Shenzhen-based BYD is also exploring export opportunities.

Japanese brands are also losing ground in the domestic Chinese market, as consumers flock to electric cars, whether produced by local companies or by Tesla.

Its not just Japanese automakers that are freaking out about China. European auto executives are worried too: Chinese-made electric cars could capture 15% of the European market by 2025, up from less than 10% last year, KPMG China chief economist Kevin Kang suggested to the South China Morning Post. 

The biggest danger for EV prices are the Chinese coming in, said Peugeot CEO Linda Jackson at a Financial Times conference in May. 

They are coming in with quite competitive prices and with very good vehicles, she said.

The short answer is: Certainly not with the technology we have today or what we can build in the foreseeable future. The longer one is more complex, but the nuance is critical for the long-term promise of A.I. to make lasting, positive impact across industries and our lives. There is undoubtedly a need for caution and vigilance when it comes to something this transformative. All revolutionary inventions need guardrails to ensure they help rather than hurt uslike the literal guardrails with high voltage warnings on train tracks. But contrary to those painting the bleakest picture of how A.I. might harm rather than help, theres little evidence right now that the machine apocalypse is nigh. And its benefits will be increasingly obvious as this technology becomes universal in business and daily life.

Were already marching toward that future. OpenAIs ChatGPT chatbot can write up a personalized parody of a Seinfeld episode featuring your friends just as easily as it can track down and explain complex academic studies on medicine. Google, Microsoft, and a collection of much smaller tech companies (alongside independent coders using open-source algorithms) are harnessing A.I. to do everything from giving you a productivity boost at the office to generating new songs featuring artists who didnt actually collaborate on the track. The rise of self-teaching machines isnt just inevitableits well underway.

The anxiety born of this radical shift isnt surprising. Fear of progress isnt new and in some cases may be warranted. But if history is a guide, the handwringing over A.I. will prove premature and misguided. Society has managed to adjust to transformative change on once unimaginable scales, like the invention of electricity. A.I. will be subject to that same scrutiny, its underlying technologies will be tweaked and improved, and any necessary regulations will followjust the same as when cars reshaped the very foundation of personal mobility before we thought up safety measures like seatbelts and emergency brakes. (Relatedly: A.I. is once again transforming automobiles with smart, autonomous vehicles.) In the same way, we will eventually embrace A.I.s positive impact on human life while fixing its flaws.

For society, artificial intelligence will prove the great equalizer of our times, a powerful tool to democratize services often siloed to the wealthy and fortunate few, while also uplifting human capacity to new heights. Theres no Spotify reserved for the upper classit gives everyone access to music from around the world. Computer was originally a term for a person whose job was to perform calculations. They were replaced by spreadsheets on the machine computers of today, up-leveling humans to become analysts who provide context and actionable intelligence to numbers rather than just crunching them.

A.I. will pave the road for that same kind of mass access to myriad services critical to our lives (medicine, law, education), and augment our ability to perform the higher functions unique to humans. And it will only become smarter and more useful as the early iterations we see today continue to self-teach through machine learning.

Weve already seen this kind of impact across multiple fields, including medicine. Why spend crucial physician time that could be used to treat more patients more efficiently on examining X-rays and MRIs when you could just use A.I. to identify a tumor or concerning abnormality? Thats not a rhetorical question. A.I. use in U.S. radiology departments shot up from zero in 2015 to 30% by 2020, facilitating faster initial diagnoses in diseases like cancer that can then be double-checked by a doctor.

Used responsibly with broad, unbiased information, A.I. could spur social change based on real-world evidence. In nations across the world, A.I. is already being used to assist in judicial investigations and boilerplate decision-making. Potentially, information collected by legal experts and watchdog groups could be fed into an A.I. system to identify concerning trends, for instance, in how minorities are treated under the law.

The more pessimistic fears are just new versions of problems that have existed in some form or another throughout human history. Scams evolved from the snake oil salesman at the door to mail to email. Human knowledge has always been inherently imperfect and a never-ending work in progress. Such relatively addressable concerns should not be used to bring down the regulatory hammer on A.I. in America. Hobbling A.I. at this critical moment wont make the world a better place, but a less hopeful one.

Youd be hard-pressed to find many who think wed be better off without electricity or cars. In 30 years, well think the same about A.I.

Vijay Pande, Ph.D., is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he focuses on investments in biopharma and healthcare.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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The note, written by Jefferies ESG strategists, led by global department head Aniket Shah, states that A.I. is inescapable but its optimistic that it could improve outcomes at the workplaceor it could become overwhelming because of how quickly it replaces humans in some sectors or hijacks important discussions on climate change.  

A.I.s ability to do ordinary tasks quicker has saved employees precious time to focus on the more challenging things. A study by researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University found that generative A.I. toolslike OpenAIs ChatGPT, for instancecan improve the productivity of employees by 14%. 

A four-day workweek?

Those gains could translate into shorter workweeks, Jeffries argues. 

A.I. will make workers much more efficient, leading to a broader acceptance of four-day work weeks, Jeffries wrote in a note Monday, noting that the U.S. had six-day workweeks until the 1930s.  

Recent experiments with four-day workweeks have been promising. Results from a trial in February conducted across dozens of companies in the U.K. showed that the results were so positive that companies wanted the policy to become the new normor at least on the employee side. Employees reported having better work-life balance and well-being from fewer work days or fewer working hours per day. About 15% of the employees in the experiment even said that no amount of money would get them to work five days again, according to advocacy group 4 Day Week Global that organized the study.  

But some companies have pushed back against adopting a shorter week because it didnt fit the nature of their work or they simply couldnt pay for it it, despite its up-side for employees. A.I. promises to fix the how-do-you-pay-for-it problem. Some companies that participated in the four day workweek experiment said that with smaller head counts, shorter weeks were unaffordable.

Of course, executives might disagree. Recall the CEO who mused aloud on a conference call about increasing his workers quotas by 30 or 40 times because A.I. was allowing them all to work multiple jobs remotely. Maybe it wont be a four-day workweek with the help of A.I., but a seven-day workweek.

Tech-human interactions

Hours of Zoom meetings and virtual conferences have become daily medicine for developed-world workers since the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped work and forced many to adopt an all-digital lifestyle. But as remote work persists, workers will increasingly want more face-time with humans away from video calls, Jefferies predicts. 

Workers will demand environments that are human only to deepen their sense of belonging to a real as opposed to virtual community, Jefferies predicted. We will see a greater push from workers not companies to get back into the office and spend time with colleagues without technology. Think of companies organizing retreats or other social gatherings that bring employees together in person, instead of through video conferencing.  

Past studies have shown the value of face-to-face interactions from a social as well as professional standpoint. For instance, a 2020 report found that employees were more creative when they faced one another in a workplace. Even prominent CEOs including Goldman Sachs David Solomon have criticized the concept of remote work as it hurts the companys culture.

While one set of employees will be jaded with technology, others will likely push back against it, Jefferies says. The benefits of A.I. could be great for companies, but perhaps not for all workers. It could spur conflicts between unions and management as workers fight to keep their jobs as A.I. threatens to take away part of the tasks. 

The U.S. will see a full reversal of its declining trends unionization (from 20.1% in 1983 to 10.1% in 2022), as workers will fear for their jobs. We are already seeing this in a range of industries, from airlines to Hollywood, less than a year since ChatGPT became public, Jefferies wrote. 

A.I. has been one of the clash points in the recent unionization drive in Hollywood among writers and directors. Last week, the directors union struck a deal with production studios to protect them from the influence of A.I. in the creative industry, including a guarantee that generative A.I. cannot replace the duties performed by members. Employees have also had concerns over a potential decrease in pay caused by A.I. doing certain tasks or jobs.  

A.I. could be good and bad news for climate action

The use of A.I. in energy transition has led to key strides in finding energy-efficient solutions and capturing data related to different processes in the industry. Jefferies predicts that the role of this tech will be front-and-center moving forward.

This acceleration will make the 2030s and 2040s a very exciting and confusing period in the energy transition, during which time the decarbonization options for companies and countries will increase tremendously, Jefferies wrote. The bank also noted how A.I. could help one of the most complex power grids in the U.S. by generating only the amount of power that is required in different times of the day. 

But on the flip-side, A.I. could also be bad news for climate change. The bank said that A.I.s allure as the next big thing could draw people away from more urgent matters including those related to the climate. 

Growing attention to the potential threats from artificial intelligence will take focus away from climate change from policymakers, business leaders and the general population, Jefferies wrote. Even though many of the tools empowered by A.I. will help on climate, there is a major threat that the social pressures currently being placed on business and government around climate will dissipate.

The idea of A.I. overpowering conversations is shared by prominent business figures. Much talk about the tech has been labeled as hype by billionaire hedge fund founder Ken Griffin. Even the founder of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Sam Altman, called the tech wildly overhyped, at least in the short term. But then again, Altman had also said its benefits and presence across the world could make it highly undervalued, even unappreciated.

The benefits of A.I.s productivity boost like the ability to have three-day weekends can be tempting, but its also been predicted for close to a centuryas has the discussion about new technology wiping away jobs. The range of Jefferies predictions, from the lengthening of the weekend to how a need for human interaction could end the remote work era, shows that we are entering a new era that will be full of surprises.