Bill Gates hits the AI panic button: ‘This is crazy. This is insane’

BS BULLETIN:

Bill Gates has gone from AI optimist to sounding the alarm over a technology he says could permanently wipe out huge numbers of jobs.
“This is crazy. This is insane,” Gates told Semafor, saying he is “deafened by the silence” from people who should be preparing for what’s coming.
His warnings get darker: cyberattacks, bioterrorism, children harmed by AI — and a future with “far fewer” jobs.

Bill Gates spent decades preaching the gospel of technology. Now even he sounds spooked.

The Microsoft co-founder issued a remarkably dire warning Wednesday about artificial intelligence, arguing that the technology is moving so quickly that governments and society are nowhere near ready for the economic and security earthquake it could unleash.

“I am in a state of shock that I’m sort of the first one saying, ‘This is crazy. This is insane,’” Gates told Semafor. “I’m just deafened by the silence.”

That’s quite a change.

Just three years ago, Gates was considerably more bullish about the AI revolution and believed its disruptions could be managed. Now he’s warning that some jobs aren’t merely going to change. They’re going away. “Many jobs will disappear forever,” Gates wrote in a massive new essay published on his GatesNotes website.

And he doesn’t mean only coders or office workers.

Gates says AI will rapidly reach into law, medicine, customer service, software and manufacturing — hitting both white-collar and blue-collar workers. Unlike earlier technological revolutions that unfolded across generations, he believes this one could rip through the labor market in roughly a decade. “There will be some new jobs,” Gates wrote, “but without the right policies there will be far fewer than exist today.”

Then there’s the genuinely scary stuff. In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Gates said AI has become dramatically more powerful just within the past year and is already creating “cyber attack risk, bioterrorism risk, psychosocial risk.”

What shocked him, he said, is that safeguards for dealing with those threats are “really completely missing.” Gates warned separately that AI could make it easier for bad actors to conduct cyberattacks and even design deadly diseases. He told Reuters that recent AI hacking capabilities “should blow people’s minds.”

His proposed response isn’t exactly small government. Gates is floating taxes on companies that replace human labor with AI and robots, along with the creation of what he calls “Human Reserved” jobs — occupations or duties society would deliberately keep in human hands even when machines could perform them.

He also wants governments to start treating AI as a global security problem and is seeking a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss international safeguards.

Perhaps the most remarkable line in Gates’ warning is also the simplest: “There is no plan to ease the entry into the AI era.”

Coming from one of the men who helped usher humanity into the computer age, that’s one hell of a warning.

MY QUICK TAKE

When the guy who helped put a computer on everybody’s desk starts yelling that the next computer revolution is moving too fast, maybe somebody should listen.

Gates isn’t predicting a few inconvenient layoffs. He’s talking about permanent job destruction, cyber warfare, biological threats and governments that aren’t remotely prepared.

AI may ultimately do extraordinary things. But “we’ll figure it out after millions of jobs disappear” doesn’t strike me as much of a plan.

And apparently, it doesn’t strike Bill Gates as one either.

DBS WIRE SOURCES