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Recently, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates wrote a lengthy blog post discussing the many pros and cons about the advancement of artificial intelligence.
“The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone,” Gates wrote. “It will change the way people work, learn, travel, get health care, and communicate with each other. Entire industries will reorient around it. Businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it.”
Bill Gates believes artificial intelligence can provide assistance with global health and education and climate change. It will also help people do their jobs.
“…advances in AI will enable the creation of a personal agent,” he writes. “Think of it as a digital personal assistant: It will see your latest emails, know about the meetings you attend, read what you read, and read the things you don’t want to bother with. This will both improve your work on the tasks you want to do and free you from the ones you don’t want to do.”
AI in the workplace will also have other benefits, according to Gates.
“When productivity goes up, society benefits because people are freed up to do other things, at work and at home,” he states.
However, as many before him have pointed out, Bill Gates also says artificial intelligence has the potential to do harm.
Bill Gates writes that AI isn’t “necessarily good at understanding the context for a human’s request” and it can give wrong answers because it can “struggle with abstract reasoning.”
Other concerns are not simply technical. For example, there’s the threat posed by humans armed with AI. Like most inventions, artificial intelligence can be used for good purposes or malign ones. Governments need to work with the private sector on ways to limit the risks.
Then there’s the possibility that AIs will run out of control. Could a machine decide that humans are a threat, conclude that its interests are different from ours, or simply stop caring about us? Possibly, but this problem is no more urgent today than it was before the AI developments of the past few months.
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Eventually, superintelligent AI, also called “strong” AI, be able to establish its own goals.
“What will those goals be? What happens if they conflict with humanity’s interests? Should we try to prevent strong AI from ever being developed?” Gates asked.
Of course, Bill Gates is far from the first person to issue these types of warnings about artificial intelligence.
In 2021, Mo Gawdat, the former Chief Business Officer with Google’s Research and Development division, warned that artificial intelligence researchers are “creating God.”
In 2022, researchers at Google Deepmind and the University of Oxford said AI will “likely” eliminate humanity.
Also in 2022, a third of artificial intelligence scientists said they believe artificial intelligence could cause a nuclear-level catastrophe.
And just a few months ago, the Chief Operating Officer at SingularityNET – the company that created Grace the healthcare robot, warned that “we will have to be vigilant” because “superhuman” robots are coming.
Then again, as the man who came up with the frightening concept of Skynet for the Terminator movies, James Cameron, pointed out recently, artificial intelligence may have already taken over the world and we just don’t realize it yet.