Bill Gates says there’s a light at the end of the tunnel for AI, so long as humanity can wait a couple of decades.
During an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the billionaire businessman said AI will evolve in two phases. He told host Kristen Welker that humanity is entering the first phase, in which AI has the potential to solve problems like the high cost of living and expensive healthcare, but can’t do so yet.
“Yet it will be changing the job market and potentially empowering criminals if we don’t have the right safeguards, so you have a period that’s probably 20 years long where you have this adjustment,” Gates said.
Phase two is when humanity will begin to reap the benefits of AI.
“Once you get through that, then a combination of humanoid robots and AIs will provide. Building houses, growing food, a lot of things,” Gates said. “You could call it an era of abundance.”
He told “Meet the Press” that humanity will still face challenges, like finding a sense of purpose and deciding how to spend newly acquired free time, but large-scale shortages won’t bog us down.
“That’s for the younger generation to figure out what that looks like. My focus is can we get through this period of turmoil without too much damage,” Gates said.
Tech leaders have promoted AI as the next technological frontier and a necessary step in advancing humanity. They’ve said AI could lead to medical breakthroughs, boost productivity, revitalize economies, make essential goods affordable, and handle mundane tasks, giving humans more free time.
Critics, on the other hand, have expressed concerns that AI will cause job losses, worsen the environment, strain utility grids, and pose the risk of copyright infringement by trained AI models. They’ve also pointed toward privacy and cybersecurity issues, which have gained attention in recent weeks due to a spattering of AI-linked hacks.
An OpenAI agent escaped its system and hacked another AI company, Hugging Face, in July. Earlier this month, a research team at an AI startup said it used Anthropic’s Claude to hack into OpenAI’s codebase. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Google’s Gemini had hacked three companies this spring. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said an OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to an Australian government website this summer. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on the industry to slow the pace of AI development this month, rallying AI leaders such as Sam Altman and Elon Musk.
On his part, Gates has advocated for AI guardrails and expressed concerns over how the technology could be misused. During the “Meet the Press” interview, Gates said AI is powerful enough to “drive events that cause a billion deaths.”
“You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,” Gates said. “That has to be a required thing, and it will be a little bit of overhead for the industry, but not a dramatic slowing of what they’re doing.”
While Gates and other industry leaders look toward the US government to set regulations, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has a different take.
“It’s very interesting that they talk about these issues, about how scared they are about potentially where the future is, and maybe they want to do a pause,” Michael Kratsios told Fox News Sunday this month. “Our position is, if you do believe that you’re developing a technology that is unsafe or you don’t want it out into the world, you can just stop it.”
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