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- Bill Gates is decidedly optimistic about AI.
- But he still has some big concerns about the cutting-edge technology.
- The Microsoft cofounder outlined three of them during a recent podcast interview.
Bill Gates is a self-described optimist about the future of AI, but the tech still raises a few key concerns for him.
Microsoft’s cofounder laid out his three biggest worries about the tech while speaking on the latest episode of the podcast “On with Kara Swisher,” released Monday.
Gates said his first concern is “that bad people with bad intent will use AIs for cybercrime, bioterrorism, nation-state wars.”
“In that case you think, okay, let’s make sure the good guys have an AI that can play defense against those things, and that makes you want to move ahead and not fall behind,” he said.
President Joe Biden’s budget for fiscal year 2025 includes billions earmarked for AI, including efforts to advance “the safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of AI” and to invest in a “new AI safety institute to protect the American public’s safety, security, and rights.”
Gates’ second concern is about the fast “rate of change” that could lead to job losses.
“In the same way that that medical diagnosis will be superior with the right training set and a few more turns of the crank on how we drive reliability, that there’s great progress on that, it will be superior at a telesales or telesupport type job, which are big parts of the economy,” Gates said.
A 2023 Goldman Sachs report said that AI could result in “significant disruption” of the labor market and impact an estimated 300 million full-time jobs. A survey conducted by HubSpot last year found sales workers saved two hours and 15 minutes a day when they used AI to automate manual tasks including meeting scheduling, note-taking, and data entry.
“AI isn’t replacing salespeople — it’s just taking care of the most repetitive aspects of their work,” the study said.
Gates said that even though you can say that AI frees up teachers and other professionals to be less spread thin, “we have unmet needs for labor.”
“If we free up all this labor, we can shorten the workweek, but the rate of change is scary,” he added.
Gates said his third concern, which “comes up a lot,” is “the loss of control” scenario. Many AI researchers and experts have warned for years of the potential consequences if AGI, or artificial general intelligence that surpasses human intelligence, is reached — including possible doomsday scenarios.
“My view is if you’ve managed to get through the first two, that actually that’s not the hardest of the three,” Gates said.
Experts have warned AI models can be abused for purposes like carrying out scams or cyberattacks or spreading misinformation, among other things.
Besides Gates, other business leaders have also expressed concerns about AI and an interest in more regulation and guardrails on the technology. Many share some of Gates’ concerns.
Microsoft’s chief economist, Michael Schwarz, said at the World Economic Forum last year that he was “confident AI will be used by bad actors, and yes it will cause real damage.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has even said while he thinks “the best case is so unbelievably good that it’s hard for me to even imagine,” on the flip side, he imagines a worst-case scenario for AI could be “lights out for all of us.”
Looking more at the present, Gates has said he uses AI in his own life to summarize meetings he attends.
“The ability to interact and not just get the summary, but ask questions about the meeting, is pretty fantastic,” he recently said in a separate interview, referring to Microsoft’s Copilot, which is powered by the company’s OpenAI partnership and available as an add-on for Microsoft 365 office apps.
