One of my usual habits when I walk around the city is to have my headphones on and listen to either music or podcast interviews. Yesterday, for some reason, I decided to listen to Ezra Klein interviewing Bill Gates. As weird as it may seem, Bill Gates was someone I never really respected, but I was still curious about what he had to say.
The thing that took me by surprise was that I was listening to both brilliant and contradictory opinions from a single person. A conflicted old man who clearly hasn't thought things through. There was a particular moment in the interview where Ezra Klein was trying to communicate a pretty clear point. What is the point of investing millions in AI learning languages that only very few people speak if your main opinion is that everyone will be unemployed or dead? To which Gates replied that those people have never met a doctor in their lives and that AI could save their lives. Oh yes, and it will also advise them on how to do their jobs better. Yes!! The jobs that they will no longer have. I would understand this part if he was more optimistic about the future of humanity.
This brings us to the second and more surprising part. When Ezra Klein was trying to explain that if the world's AI systems are restricted to the US and China, and if American businesses contribute to a pension-like fund, like Gates suggested, for US citizens to have a basic income, what will this mean for other countries? Will US having complete dominance over them be a positive or negative? Gates just brushed it off. I think deep down he believes that AI will unite every nation in the world, which I very much doubt.
If I had to sum up Bill Gates's opinions, it would be to just hand over everything to AI after building the "control layer," and live a happy, ignorant life while AI governs us. Yet he continued, ultimately keeping or banning AI, needs to be "the people's choice". But at the same time, he stated that protesting against AI and data centers is pointless, and those will be built regardless of any efforts to oppose them.
He argued that the current generation of AI already has the capability to bring down governments and start biological warfare, and that we need to act and try to stop it before an incident happens. If that is the case and these capabilities are already freely available, what is the timeline in his own opinion for something like this to occur? Surely bad actors won't feel the need to wait. At the same time, we already have someone planning a mass shooting with AI in Canada. One thing we definitely need to decide is who is responsible for a crime that was executed or assisted by AI. Is it the user or the company behind it? If every time an AI committed a felony, someone from the AI labs went to jail, then the race wouldn't be so reckless.
One thing I do agree with Gates on is how he proposes taxes and contributions should work in the future. There is a counterargument, thought: for that to work, AI needs in a way to be owned by everyone and no one. Yet today we saw regulations to be summarized like everything nowadays to "trust me bro" and "pinky promises" from a "strong and smart president" while at the same time renaming current models to something that actually implies DANGER!
Since we are talking about extreme hypothetical scenarios. What will happen, if nothing goes wrong and AI loves us and cherries us. But then suddenly one day we get such a massive CME that will destroy a large portion of the planet's electronics? If something like that happened today, projections suggest that a recovery will take 2-5 years with a large impact in the worldwide population. But if we over-rely on AI for everything. Would we even have the knowledge to rebuild everything from scratch? ...or we will end civilazation with a smile.