Bill Gates stakes reputation: AI is not like past tech – Transcript

00:00warning from Bill Gates about artificial intelligence. The Microsoft co-founder is sounding the alarm in a new essay he's put out arguing that the AI industry is not admitting the real risk of the technology and he says it should be quote the world's top priority to deal with those risks. He writes, "The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical." He says AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented or the worst source of injustice. Gates thinks the world

00:26is not preparing for what's to come. I spoke to Gates earlier in an exclusive TV interview. Bill, you said that there's no plan to ease the entry into the AI era and that we underestimate the impact of of AI. In what way? Over the last year, these AIs have gotten dramatically more powerful, even faster than I expected, and they're now capable of causing um cyber attack risk,

00:55bioteterrorism risk, psychosocial risk. And I have to say, I'm kind of shocked that the exact criteria that we review these models with and the actions we take to minimize the harms are really completely missing. and the broad dialogue we get all of society talking about the trade-offs here uh that's just not taking place and so uh you know we've got to minimize these harms through careful

01:24review and criteria and we have to accelerate the good stuff or else you know we could have a complete backlash uh that uh AI would suffer from. I I talked to Dario Amade uh last May. He was estimating 50% of all entry- levelvel white collar jobs could be eliminated between in the next 1 to 5 years. 10 to 20% unemployment possibly in the next uh 5 years. You write about the what you

01:53think are the three big risks that come with the transition to AI. Can you just go through them? Yeah. So the there's a big risk of people with ill intent either defrauding people uh cyber attacks or in the extreme case bioteterrorism. And so you know these um negative uses uh we need to monitor

02:20things like creating a a dangerous virus uh to to see if that's happening. Another problem will be the job market change which has not happened yet but because the are getting so reliable now uh they can be used for a variety of well-defined jobs and you know that would uh be a tough thing

02:45to adjust to and finally just the uh psychosocial effect that a kid might have all their friends being AIS and not be pushed to deal with real humans and you know all the learnings and joy you get uh by being engaged socially and so every one of those things uh I'm very concerned and

03:09I want to slow down or eliminate those negative effects. Well, I mean is that possible? I mean on on the job loss, you know, the the counterargument that some people make is look, you know, at every technological change, there's been job losses. You know, with the electric light bulb, lamp lighters lost their jobs. You in this essay make the argument that a lot of past technological changes,

03:35the job losses have have taken place over a longer period of time, even several generations in some cases, these job losses will come much quicker and all at once. Yes, it's across every sector of the economy. uh initially with white collar but then as the humanoid human humanoid robots come along blue collar as well you will have for the first time the equivalent of human cognition.

04:04So that past history misleads people because there we were richer and so jobs like you know designing rides at Disneyland having more psychiatrists we were richer enough to create those additional jobs here as the machine gets better uh than human for well- definfined jobs and works 24 hours a day it's going to be a bigger deal and so the the bar for somebody coming along and

04:30saying this time is different is very high but I'm staking my reputation completely on the fact that uh in terms of the impact on the job market, this is very different than any technology that I've been involved with or that uh has come across in human history. How concerned are you about and do

04:53you think society has kind of considered enough what the impact of just people not having or or machines or or computers being able to do jobs much better than humans can? I mean like what happens to pride in work or human initiative or I mean you write about what happens to kids who and critical thinking that seems really alarming to me. Yes. uh you know the AIs can do unbelievable

05:23good including if you want to learn more you know and uh you know help have an aid to help make better decisions analyze data I'm you know a very excited user but it is such a dramatic change that I really expected this last year as we crossed the threshold of danger that society would

05:47get involved in this dialogue. Instead, right now you have, you know, people in the industry sort of disagreeing with each other, but to get the right solutions politically to bring the right expertise to bear to make it democratically valid to move as quickly as we need to, uh it's got to be uh the academicians. It's got to be more corporate voices and eventually, you know, politicians

06:13in both parties listening to these concerns and making sure we don't end up with some, you know, sort of just pure black and white stop at all. Uh because we don't have the right reviews and thresholds and uh safeguards. As as a parent, it's I mean, it's hard to fully grasp what's going to happen in the next 5 years, let alone 15. H what do you say to parents about if you had little kids

06:40now? How would you be approaching this? Yeah, I spent uh a few days with the two granddaughters I have three and one and you know it just makes you think what will education be like? I divide the challenge here into two periods. we have the the next 20 years where the AIs are not able to, you

07:06know, make all the food and do the manufacturing and, you know, maintain all the robots. And so, you'll have once you get to that 20-year period, you'll have deep purpose issues, but you'll have a lot of abundance. I'm more focused in this memo on how do we get through this incredibly uh turmoilridden period we'll have where society's adjusting to this completely unprecedented

07:33uh set of capabilities and you know I'm saying don't think that they're going to stop and not be good at things there's people who you know think oh they must they must they're going to reach some upper bound for the majority of jobs that is not the case. And so, uh, the silence is what really drove me to speak out at this point. Uh, because we have to get everybody's voice

08:02in this. You know, these are a set of democratic tradeoffs uh, that have to be made. And, you know, people who think, okay, I'll block a data center, that really isn't going to slow things down. Those data centers will show up somewhere. uh we have to take the AI issue and it's the bads versus the goods on in a very explicit way. One of the things you write, you said this is either going to be the greatest equalizer ever invented or the worst source of injustice. Which one do you think it

08:30is right now if you had to guess which one is it going to be? I still believe that if we activate society broadly uh both as users as uh you know a lot of experts you know what I am saying is that for all of the challenges there would be a serious review and a criteria under which a model

08:52had to meet things like being monitorable for uh creating uh bioteterrorism tools uh and so I still think it's within our grasp ASP to shape this in a net positive way. You know, it's it's like when nuclear came along, is it nuclear weapons or is it nuclear energy? This is a thousand times bigger and has both that the negative aspect and the positive uh coexisting in the same technology.