Bill Gates Says His ‘Big Concern’ Is the 20-Year Transition to a World Where AI Makes Almost Everything Abundant — ‘Humanity Will Have to Find a Way to Organize and Have Purpose’
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Microsoft Corpco-founder and former CEO Bill Gates, who chairs the Gates Foundation, said humanity "will have to find a way to organize and have purpose" in an era of "true abundance" from AI.
Speaking on The Verge's "Decoder with Nilay Patel" podcast, Gates said his "big concern" is the 20-year transition to that point, which he said will bring "winners and losers and a lot of disruption."
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Gates on 'True Abundance' and Control
Patel asked what world his children will enter if any activity "will quickly be seen as just another domain for AI to conquer." Gates said building houses with humanoid robots and making them cheap, and curing diseases that otherwise wouldn't be cured, is not "rapacious" but "fulfilling goals." He said 20 years from now, "it's not clear what shortages there will be at all," "And so humanity in that era of true abundance will have to find a way to organize and have purpose and hopefully they still have the control," he said.
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Asked about that control, Gates called it "the alignment problem" and said assuming it is solved is "an assumption, yes, and not guaranteed."
Gates on Robots and Human-Reserved Work
Gates called 20 years "a reasonably safe number" but said, "I could be wrong about that number." If "we don't choose to massively slow down or stop," he said, robots could build houses, grow food and do surgery, and "none of the things that human labor provides to the economy will be necessary for most goods and services."
He proposed in a memo that childcare, food preparation, art and sports might be chosen as "human reserved," even though AI could do them better, calling it "a policy question."
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AI and the Labor Market
On the transition he flagged, Gates told The Atlantic in August that he is "extremely concerned about the labor market effects" within two years for white-collar work and four years for both blue- and white-collar work.
The International Monetary Fund's Managing Director Kristalina Georgievahas also addressed AI and jobs. She said in Bangkok that AI could affect around 40% of jobs worldwide, whether enhanced, downgraded or eliminated, Reuters reported. The share is 60% in advanced economies and 23% in low-income countries.
On the abundance question, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. CEO Elon Musksaid at the Abundance Summit in March that AI and robots will "run out of things to do for the humans," and that he expects "universal high income."
Photo courtesy: lev radin/Shutterstock
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