Software king of the world and sworn enemy of the mosquito, Sir Bill Gates thinks AI is being shoved into society without a proper plan.
Writing in his bog, Gates has warned that companies are racing ahead with AI while politicians, bosses and communities pretend the blast radius is manageable. He thinks the jobs market and the human condition are heading for a proper kicking.
“Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history. Right now, we are not preparing for it. I don’t see evidence that leaders, experts and communities are confronting the challenges adequately,” he said.
The tone is much grimmer than Gates’s 2023 AI essay, when he sounded as excited as he had been about PCs and the internet. This time, he still nodded at AI’s potential in energy, medical care and agriculture, but spent rather more time warning how badly it could go.
“There is no plan to ease the entry into the AI era,” he wrote, calling for more regulation of the technology.
“You have a chance to act now, before unemployment rises sharply, communities are hurting, and public trust has eroded,” he wrote.
Most of the essay dealt with jobs. Gates said entry-level and mid-level roles were most exposed, but blue-collar workers should not feel smug because AI will reach them soon enough. Law, customer service, software and manufacturing could all feel the hit within a decade. Previous workplace shifts, such as the move from agriculture to office jobs, took generations.
“When AI can produce error-free work, it will be able to function on its own without a human checking in on it, and companies will have every economic incentive to let it,” Gates wrote.
That means society will need a stronger safety net, Gates said. He pointed to factory closures and opioid deaths as a warning of what happens when communities are gutted.
“Imagine similar pressures on both white-collar and blue-collar workers nationwide,” he said.
Gates warned that AI will make cyberattacks on grids, hospitals and banks nastier. Fraud, surveillance and autonomous weapons will get a boost too, which is nice if your idea of progress involves a more efficient dystopia.
“This would be the worst possible time for humans to lose their critical thinking skills… In an era of deepfakes and misinformation that can be tailored to you individually, the ability to tell what is true from what is not becomes an essential life skill.”
Gates wants taxes on AI tokens and bots to slow the corporate stampede away from human labour. The cash could help pay for retraining and replace income tax revenue if fewer people are working.
He said societies could reserve some jobs for humans, much as governments protect public land from development. Some roles require empathy and care, while others may be held by workers who are difficult to retrain.
