Bill Gates: The choices we make about AI now are critical

I am not optimistic. What we learned from history is that despite all warnings and good intentions, governments, corps and citizens will make every possible mistake before we finally arrive at another precariously stable situation. Experts are famously bad at predicting the outcomes of new technologies/policies even in times of relatively low upheaval. And plans have a way of producing many significant unintended consequences. This is not going to prevent people with strong opinions from asserting that they know exactly what needs to be done. And in the rush to do something many things will certainly be done. We are screwed at least for a while.

If A.I. starts to replace jobs en masse I propose we tax the companies profiting from this at a rate of 95% so we can finance welfare and Universal Basic Income schemes.

We need to be aware that said companies and the people behind them will do anything in their power, including bribing politicians, to prevent this and to keep the money they believe are they're entitled to.

I even believe the Big Tech bigwigs have long foreseen this and are quietly prodding our society towards an authoritarian regime where people have no say so they can keep their moonies.

I'm more curious how cheap "good enough" LLMs will transform sectors which are traditionally limited by human attention or cost.

For example, taxes. E.g. in Germany your personal tax return filing has a low but real chance to get audited, someone will look at it and try to find discrepancies and/or ask for additional documentation. With LLMs this can conceivably be performed for every return, matching incomplete disparate information streams into one structured picture for every taxpayer.

Or even things like customs screening, where a CT scan provides a full reconstructable list of everything in your possession, down to every bill, and audited on the spot against your declaration.

For the governments, there's not much incentive to automate "jobs", for the companies as well this is a cost question, but for control, all bets are off...

"In terms of equity, AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice. The challenge is monumental. Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history. How will we use this technology to make the world a fairer place and keep it from widening the divide between rich and poor? "

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One look at who is in the driver's seat should give you the answer to this question. The initial roll-out will, by very deliberate design, put dynamite in the divide and set it off. This has happened before.

The industrial revolution was very similar. Initially, workers suffered. Conditions were unsafe. Pay was poor. Worker rights were non-existent. Things got worse for the majority before social change caught up and imposed a more equitable distribution of the dividends.

We should be under no illusion that this time will be any different. The rich and powerful are no less selfish than they were a quarter millennium ago. It is possible to get ahead of the problem, but the people running AI companies won't be the ones to do it. Governments are inclined to do what the people paying for their election campaigns want, but should be aware that standing up for inequality will only make things worse for them when the tides of social change start rolling in on them.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

"... AI will avoid climate change."

xAI's Colossus 1 and 2 data center mobile gas turbines beg to differ.

AI data centers are driving electricity consumption in 100s of GW, and most of that energy is not clean renewable nor nuclear.

I feel this is merely stating the obvious.

It goes back to the industrial revolution and every revolution before and after. There was a point where they thought a majority of people would be working as switchboard operators and then telephone switching came along. Horses to cars, etc.

Jobs transition, new space is created, people are caught in tbe crossfire of supply and demand curves. Incan agree the bullwhip of this one is going to be aggressive.

I think it is a mistake to bet on AI as a driver of meaningful growth in a commercial capacity in the current state. When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium.

I think the world at large is "learning on the job" what data scientists and others in ai have known for a long, several decades long, time have already known.

Related to the form of the article rather than the content: what purpose do pull quotes serve in an online publication? Especially on phones they are so goofy, you read the pull quote and then one or two lines later you read it again. I get it for scanability in newspapers but I think it should be deprecated in online publishing.

>If someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, I would likely support it. However, I don’t think that’s going to happen. The geopolitical and economic incentives are pushing too hard to go full speed ahead.

It seems to me that "middle powers" such as Canada, Australia, EU nations, India, and South Korea have an incentive to slow things down. Since many don't trust either the US or China. Coincidentally, Canada has been working to assemble a coalition of middle powers. And an EU nation (the Netherlands) controls ASML, which is key to the AI supply chain.

The observer (Mr Gates) is inside the tech ecosystem, so his observations would be colored by the pace of things happening around him, in the tech space.

The world outside has much more friction and many other things going on. Tech had a wild run during his time because the American priorities at that time, favored it. There is no guarantee that tech would have same priority in a world that might get into more basic struggles.

If AI could affect jobs, that itself would work against it as it would cause basic struggles. Ultimately the world has to oscillate towards an equilibrium, acknowledging all forces from all corners. World is not a tech lab.