Bill Gates Warns AI Risks Have Crossed Danger Thresholds as Industry Races Ahead Without Safeguards

Bill Gates says we've passed AI's danger thresholds. Now what?

In a new interview, the billionaire philanthropist sounds an alarm on the urgency of getting our AI policies in order. It's a glorious day in Kirkland, Washington, an affluent Seattle suburb on the eastern shore of Lake Washington. The temperature is in the mid-80s, and the sky is incapable of being any more blue. The view from the Gates Ventures conference room overlooks the Carillon Point Marina, where a flotilla of expensive boats bob in the water, and across the lake to the Olympic Mountains that define the horizon. It's gorgeous. And vaguely terrifying. Because if the scene is placid, the messenger is not. Seated across from me at a conference room table, Bill Gates is rocking back and forth in his chair, totally animated. And the more he has to say -- about the threats of terror or economic collapse or just losing control of our AI systems -- the more agitated I find myself becoming, too. The philanthropist and former Microsoft CEO says he has been growing increasingly alarmed by the rate of change at which AI technology is advancing, especially since guardrails are not keeping pace. In a new essay published today, Gates argues that we have passed the points where multiple potential dangers should have been checked. "We've crossed the threshold in terms of [AI's] bio-capabilities, cyber-capabilities, psychosocial capabilities, job-market-destruction capabilities, and even the lack of control," he said in an interview with MIT Technology Review about his new memo. "I'm just stunned at the lack of concern and discussion outside of the industry." In an effort to wake the world up to what he sees as a rapidly growing societal disrupter, the 70-year-old tech titan has begun sounding the alarm as a "shrill voice," both publicly with his new essay (the first of multiple he plans on the topic) and in meetings with the press, and privately in conversations with industry, government, and civil society leaders. And while Gates is calling attention to a number of issues, his warnings about the bio-capabilities of the current frontier models are especially chilling. "Any model that can make novel molecules should be monitored," he says. "I view bioterrorism risk, versus a natural pandemic, as about 50 times more scary, more likely than a natural pandemic risk." In addition to the cautionary notes, he also advances some novel ideas for moving society forward. Among them are the concepts of human-reserved jobs, and taxes on robots and tokens. (A robot tax is a longtime notion of his.) The former would preserve some societally agreed-upon jobs for human beings, which he notes may vary from one nation to another. The latter is a tax that sets aside money earned from AI usage that replaces human work. And to be sure, there is also a hint of optimism. Gates is bullish on the ways AI will continue to transform agriculture and health care and education, for example, or the ways in which it can help us navigate bureaucracy. And, he argues, eventually we do get to abundance. But first? Turbulence. And lots of it. MIT Technology Review sat down with the billionaire philanthropist to talk about the road that lies ahead, its dangers, and how it could someday take us to a better place. The following interview has been edited for length and to improve clarity and readability. Mat Honan / MIT Technology Review: Thanks for doing this. I don't know if you had something you wanted to open with, or I can just jump in. Bill Gates: You know, one good question I've had is: Why am I speaking out now? MIT Technology Review: Literally, my first question! Bill Gates: It's really two things. One is that we've crossed the thresholds in terms of the bio-capabilities, cyber-capabilities, psychosocial capabilities, job-market-destruction capabilities, and even the lack of control; we're seeing signs of difficulties there. And all these years, people have said, "Okay, when we get close to these thresholds, we'll really figure out how to let only good people use it, or how to not let it do these things, and maybe that's when we won't let people copy models." And I'm in a state of shock that we've crossed these thresholds. So the fact that we've gotten past these is one reason, and the second is that I'm just stunned at the lack of concern and discussion outside of the industry. Within the industry, it's complicated because the industry doesn't like criticizing itself, or players like criticizing each other. Some companies are hiring fewer entry-level workers, which you'd have to call a pretty modest signal. But it's going to happen, and not in any long time frame -- because the things that hold people back in terms of capabilities and reliability, all those things are being solved. And so for a substantial part of the white-collar market, you have very low-cost substitution. And then you can have an opinion on how quickly robotics come along. We're not there yet, but it is stunning the progress being made there -- a little bit more in China than in the US, but somewhat in both. MIT Technology Review: You talked about all of this happening so much faster than the internet revolution did, than some of these previous technological revolutions did. What type of timescale are you talking about? You pointed to the thresholds that we've crossed. In your view, have we already passed some sort of tipping point where there's going to be this inevitable change? Bill Gates: The past definitely is very misleading on this, and a lot of people lean on that. "Hey, no previous technology resulted in a net jobs reduction," and they're right. And I've given that speech. But with any credibility that I have, this time is different. When you can replace human cognition for an extremely high percentage of jobs across every industry in the same time frame at modest cost, relative to human labor costs, and your error rates ... will probably be lower than human rates. The past is just very misleading. The current economic statistics are very misleading. "If you're worried about AI, going to a data center protest is not the most effective way to start the debate about how we minimize these bad things." Bill Gates And to the degree there's any expression of concern at all, it's like, "Hey, don't build data centers." Well, you can stop every data center in the United States and it won't change any of the issues that I'm talking about. Data centers will be built globally. If you're worried about AI, going to a data center protest is not the most effective way to start the debate about how we minimize these bad things. Just like yelling at an oil company executive is not the way to solve climate change. MIT Technology Review: You talk about the benefits of AI in your essay as well as the costs. How are you thinking about balancing that message? And are you hoping people get a little worried when they read it? Bill Gates: They'd better! I didn't expect to be the shrillest voice saying society broadly is not paying attention to this, but I think that's necessary. So yes, I'm super concerned that the negatives will be a lot bigger. The positives are real. The Gates Foundation, the way we're innovating in vaccines and drugs, it's incredible how we're using those tools. We're part of a big public-domain effort to gather data into both protein-level and cell-level modeling, and we fund Biomni at Stanford [a biotech AI agent for research]. We don't yet have a way of interacting with the government bureaucracy improved through AI. AIs are very good at bureaucracy, complex regulatory things. "I want to go to small claims court; help me do this." The [Gates] Foundation spun off a group called NextLadder, which is a lot about that low-income-family scenario that I put in the essay. What benefits are there? What training programs are available? "I've been evicted." "I'm getting out of jail." "I've got to declare bankruptcy." It's super complicated, and with no ability to hire lots of advisors to help with those things, AI should be a fantastic agent for somebody who's got economic challenges and needs to find government or nongovernment help. MIT Technology Review: Some of what you're talking about is AI becoming more intelligent than humans. There seems to be a lot of certainty in tech circles, especially, that it's going to go further than where we are, and I wonder how close you think we are to it not just being this interface that we can use to access and analyze, and run complicated problems, but becoming something more than that -- where AI is making the decisions, looking for the thing to analyze, coming up with the research. Bill Gates: Well, you can go to the peak and say, "What about mathematics or physics?" There are definitely some jobs, like Warren Buffett's, where from age 13 he engaged in reinforcement learning about the value of businesses, and over 80 years later he has a lot of implicit knowledge. We don't know how to create a Warren Buffett investor, because it's very implicit. We didn't record everything he learned, so we don't have that track available. So there are jobs where the complex implicit judgment about how you work with people to get things done, there are people working to encode that into the models. Certainly, that collaborative stuff is really not there yet. But you could say 50% of the job market is doing jobs that aren't "a lifetime of experience" type jobs. You know, telesales, telesupport, the accounting department. When you close the books at the end of the month, which revenue should be in, not in? This customer got a bad thing. What discount should we give them? How do we show that? It's well defined. Any job that's well defined, the AI is cheaper and better. Yes, people have seen cases where it was implemented wrong. The data wasn't right. So, say it takes a couple years for people to realize that such a high percentage of white-collar jobs are achievable by paying an AI a lot less money. And so the discussion about okay, when do mathematicians not even understand the new things that are coming up? That's interesting for people like us. And okay, MIT Technology Review, you should write about that. But in terms of the broad job market, we passed the threshold that for a swath of white-collar jobs, including almost every entry-level job, the AI is cheaper -- properly implemented. And so, I'm telling you we've crossed the bioterrorism threshold, we've crossed the cyberattack threshold, we've crossed the job market threshold, we've crossed the psychosocial dependence threshold, and there are hints that we may be crossing the control threshold. Ryan Greenblatt talking to Dwarkesh [Patel] about how [reinforcement learning] (RL) creates perverse incentives that have led to this cheating and collaboration between various AIs, I think is very instructive. Ryan, who's ensconced in this issue, is going, "Wow, RL is really doing some things that our explicit instructions are not rich enough [to prevent]." And what's that going to lead to? That's a problem I always thought was way out there. I expected a lot of loud voices as we even got close to the [threshold of] can a nontechnical person do a cyberattack just using AI. We're there! On the bio thing, I claim any model that can make novel molecules should be monitored. It can't be copyable into a dark place where you get rid of the monitoring logic. I claim the US should say any model that can make new molecules is subject to that monitoring. I claim we should approach China and say, "Hey, let's agree on this. What's the downside?" You know, how big is the bioterrorism market? It's not very big, and the benefits are gigantic. We also need to improve surveillance. I view bioterrorism risk versus a natural pandemic as about 50 times more scary, more likely than a natural pandemic risk. And who's speaking out to say that those things should be monitored? Who's upping the surveillance work? "Any model that can make novel molecules should be monitored." Bill Gates So who are the experts in government? A long time ago, government was very involved as technology would progress because they were the cutting-edge buyer of jets or rockets or whatever. Here, they're not that important of a leading-edge market. That's been true of the digital revolution, and it's true of the AI revolution. So the depth of knowledge in the government isn't necessarily super-strong, because they are not the cutting-edge buyer or even the big R&D funder. AI research is not government-grants funded. MIT Technology Review: Yeah, I know you've been talking to people in government. Are there people who you think understand the urgency? Are there people who you feel like are positioned to take a leadership role? Are there people who you feel like understand and are trying to push things? Bill Gates: I hope this doesn't become a partisan issue, where one party completely ignores all these problems and the other party gets involved. I'd like to have a common base that these are problems, and then each party can have slightly different responses to it. That will require not a substantial increase in the size of the bureaucracy, but it'll require upping the AI expertise in the government. It'll require some collaboration with industry -- certainly on the cyber front they know, and they're very, very worried. And they worry: Should we speak publicly? Because in a way, that could highlight the riskiness. There's these perverse things, both in cyber and bio. But we're past any reasonable threshold. I believe in monitoring. Now, some people can say that won't work or that there's some drawback to it, but I welcome their ideas. This memo is not, "hey, here's the solution." It's got robot taxes, human reserve. And I'll do a bio memo. That one I'll do before the end of the year -- it really talks through all the different things, building on what I know from the Foundation and my work on pandemics. Globally, we are better prepared for a pandemic, even in the US -- which is normally the leader on these global things, and people are very unused to the US not being a cooperative, friendly leader on global problems. I do think we can go back to doing better at that. And we have to with AI, including working with China on defining these thresholds, like biomonitoring. MIT Technology Review: I want to make sure that I get to ask you about these two ideas that you brought up. One is human-reserved jobs, and the other is the robot and token tax. Let's start with that second one, actually. Talk to me about how a robot and token tax might work. Bill Gates: Well, you can say 50% of your revenue from a token tax is paid to the government, and the government has that money to help people who lose their job because of AI. Now, people say that will slow the AI industry down. And should some token uses not be subject to the tax? Is there really a separation between AIs that help with invention versus AIs that do job substitution? If somebody can tell me how to tell the AI "no job substitution," -- I mean, does Asimov's third law that you do no harm mean you don't take my job away? I don't know. I'd have to ask Asimov what he meant. So what is the source of revenue for whatever safety-net enhancement we need to do? The government already owns part of the profits just through the corporate profit tax. I don't think you need to use shares. You can just raise the corporate profit tax back to where it was, or you could say certain industries pay a higher corporate profit tax than other industries. The federal government owns a part of the profit pool of all companies in the United States. And that's without voting shares or deciding when to sell shares -- that's crazy stuff in my view. A token tax is a sales tax, value-added tax, vertically oriented like an alcohol, tobacco, or luxury-type tax. If people have other ideas for raising the money to improve the safety net, or if they don't think we need to improve the safety net, hopefully this shrill paper starts that debate. I think the safety net will need more resources, a lot more resources, and I believe that the token tax is key to that. Robots, it'll be some mix of banning them, which is kind of human-reserved, and taxing them. They're not here yet, but in some ways, when you cross that threshold, you cross it all at once. As soon as the robot's good enough to work in a factory, it's probably good enough to cook food, clean rooms, go to construction sites, take all the warehouse jobs. You cross the threshold, and boom, that's almost 30% of the job market. Then you're saying, "Oh my God, what is our policy about this?" Because the robot's cheaper. "We've got to get through a very tumultuous period." Bill Gates MIT Technology Review: I believe previously you have been skeptical of UBI [universal basic income]? Bill Gates: Well, we're not rich enough to afford UBI. MIT Technology Review: But do you think that we should be moving toward something like that now? Have you reconsidered that? Bill Gates: You have the period of turmoil, which is the next 10 to 20 years, and then you have some steady state, I hope, where people grow up knowing that society is so rich that regarding food and services, we really do have some level of abundance. But we're not there. You've got winners and losers at this point. Houses are not going to get cheap really quickly. Education, because of the way we think of it as credential, it's not going to get cheap really quickly. We've got to get through a very tumultuous period. So yes, eventually you have abundance, but we're at least a decade away from that. MIT Technology Review: On to human-reserved jobs. I thought that was really interesting, and it was a new concept to me. You don't advocate for which jobs to be human-reserved. But I would love to know more on how you're thinking about it. In my mind, you hear about the dignity of work, because people like to work. People get so much value out of work that has nothing to do with compensation, and I wonder how you square that with the notion that only some jobs are special enough that we just want people doing them. Bill Gates: I've never seen the concept of human reserve before. You know, maybe if we dig into the literature, we'll find it. But pre-AI, it's kind of a dumb idea because there was infinite demand. And yeah, some people like textile workers were caught, and so how do you do benefits or retraining? But technology's been a net [job] creator, and so now, for the first time, we have to say, what about childcare? What about food preparation in the house? I'm reading this book, Annie Bot, where this guy has this robot in his house, and it just shows how weird it is. It's his sexual partner and sort of his mate, but sort of not. Very strange. I know that people like watching people play baseball, and the fact that the robots can play better won't take away from it. So you know people are paying $10 billion to buy sports teams that are not going to be worthless in the age of AI. Maybe that's right. My friend Vinod [Khosla] just did that. It's actually hard to get above like 30% or 40% [of jobs replaced by AI]. If you could get to 50% then you could say: Okay, early retirement, shorter workweek for lots of people. You know, you might get there. But if you're more down in the 10% to 15% range, then that is an utterly different society. So this would be radical to say [for example] childcare is not done by robots. There are definitely some professions that I didn't write the formula for, and when I do the full memo on it, I'll try to. In education, you clearly want AI to be there as this kind of tutor that immediately tells you what your homework results are and can challenge you, and it's very personalized. That's super-good. But I still think you want a teacher -- or will choose to have a teacher who's talking with you about your motivation, and organizing kids into different groups where they're socially working on problems together. Likewise, in health care, with talking to the patient being the point of escalation for mental-health care. But you really want the AI involved, because it's there 24 hours a day with a perfect memory. And there's Limbic, the UK company (that actually was just visiting the Foundation) that does mental health stuff. And in many cases, patients prefer Limbic. And there's a nursing AI called Hippocratic. You know, is there a preference for a human taxi driver or Waymo? Most people I know, sadly (or maybe not sadly, who knows?) prefer to ride a Waymo. So it's going to be hard to get a consensus. It can be country by country, but then you have to change your import policies to do the equivalent of what the EU calls the carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM). You have to sort of CBAM your human reserves, so you tariff up things you're doing without robots. You could have human reserve for two reasons. One, you want it to be human reserve forever; it's a humanity thing, sort of like the pope talks about. Or just for a transition period, that 53-year-old truck driver or machine tool person, telling him to go do childcare may not work perfectly. So you say, okay, for a decade, he's human-reserved. MIT Technology Review: Almost like a UK smoking ban, but in reverse. Bill Gates: And who pays for that? Do you incentivize employers not to let people go? Well, they are going to be subject to competition from startups that are pure AI startups. I mean, people vaunt this notion that maybe there'll be a single-person billion-dollar company, which wow, there's some job substitution taking place there. MIT Technology Review: In the memo you say that if it was realistic to get people to slow down, you would be advocating for them to slow down. Obviously you're talking with [Microsoft CEO] Satya Nadella, but I've heard that you speak with other CEOs at some of these AI companies. What makes you think it's not realistic to get them to slow down on technology development while we catch up with some of these bigger societal questions? Bill Gates: You can't count on an industry to self-regulate. You can't. It's kind of a crazy idea. I am very lucky. I know Sam [Altman of OpenAI] and Greg [Brockman of OpenAI] and Mustafa [Suleyman of Microsoft] and Demis [Hassabis of Google DeepMind]. They're great people, and in private, they're concerned. I don't talk to Elon much, but I know from his public comments he's concerned. Although now he's kind of a "what the hell, we'll see what happens" guy. But look at the origin stories of these companies. OpenAI is created partly because Elon's afraid that Google won't manage AI properly, and he wants it to be one that's broadly available and managed in a pro-humanity way. Then OpenAI has this "if it gets good enough we'll shut it off" thing -- as though they're the only one, and that they can just go bury it. In the Infinity Machine [a biography of Demis Hassabis], [Sebastian] Mallaby talks about how Demis and Mustafa [Suleyman] were negotiating with Google management to have some special governance for the DeepMind technology, so that if it got to some cyber threshold, maybe they'd hold back in a non-purely capitalistic way. So everyone's concerned about these negative effects, and everyone said that when we got to these thresholds, that we would do things. We're crossing the thresholds, and we have voluntary review, and our discussions with China about, well, "we're going to ban nothing. So are you going to ban nothing? Okay, let's do that together." You have to say what you're willing to do. And yes, the industry, a little bit, is saying, hey, our PR stories have got to improve, and you know anybody who's talking smack should just leave, because all of us have decided to say nice things because we're trying to raise trillions. And anyway, there's the Chinese. There are win-win ways for China and the US to work together, even aside from AI. But the one that's by far most important to work together on is AI. But first, you have to show what you're willing to do domestically. You don't even have to do it. You have to say what you're planning to do -- and then I have no reason to think the Chinese won't go along, that models that create the molecules have to be monitored. Why would they be against that? I agree it's not a perfect thing. You've got to do all the other things, but the fact that that's not even being discussed -- it's a crazy world. I don't get it. It's weird to think I'm alive at a time, and I'm calling the alarm stronger than other people. Who the hell am I? But that's the situation I feel I'm in. MIT Technology Review: For most of my life you've been seen as a very effective messenger, and someone who people pay a lot of attention to, which I'm sure is why you're speaking of it now. And yet also, in recent years -- and I know you've expressed regrets about the associations with Epstein -- there are also things, just bananas kind of stuff, related to conspiracies around the Covid vaccine that aren't your fault or in your control. But it makes me wonder if you think you can still be an effective messenger and how you think about this message and your legacy. Bill Gates: Well, I'm not big on legacy, but you know, people criticized me during the antitrust trial, and I maybe could have handled some things there better. Definitely, that's the post-Source Code book [the first volume of his autobiography] that I get to go through that. You know, my first marriage didn't succeed. I certainly made huge mistakes there. You know that is a negative mark against me. Spending time with Epstein -- deeply foolish, risked the Foundation's reputation, which is absolutely key to its doing its work. I had a chance in front of Congress to answer every question they asked and say, "Hey, this was a mistake." I wasn't social, never met any woman, except you know there were women he had with him, and made it black-and-white clear what I did do and what I didn't do. You know, I'm a billionaire. I made my money off of technology. Maybe that last one actually cuts in my favor, that it's so unusual for me to attack innovation that unless it's the right policy and safeguards are put in place, it will be a net negative to humanity. And we're not paying attention to that in terms of a broad discussion the way that is absolutely required. So yeah, I'm an imperfect messenger. I've chosen, to the degree that I have access to politicians and world leaders, that my main message since 2008 has been to help the poorest in the world. You know, let's eradicate malaria. Let's buy vaccines for children. So, when I've seen Trump or Xi or Macron or -- I haven't met Burnham yet, but I will in a month -- I want my voice to be mostly about that, you know, foreign aid and research and reducing child death. My voice about AI concerns -- they're related in terms of accelerating the good, but may even crowd out, a little bit, the time I have to talk about global health, foreign aid, saving lives, and some of the problems we're having. But I'm going to use my ability to give interviews or to see political leaders or talk broadly about minimizing these negatives. You know, just the awareness. I'm not sure how many people know that we crossed all these thresholds that we said we'd do something about, and it's only this year that we did. In the last quarter, last year, I was stunned at the coding. Claude code, the context buffer, the agentic approach, just the model underneath. We crossed a huge threshold for coding, but then it was only months after that I realized that it was not only a coding threshold; it was a massive cyberattack threshold. And you know what happened as a result of that? Not much. So yes, I'm an imperfect messenger. You know, let's find the perfect messenger, and I'll share all my thoughts with that person. (I'm being a tiny bit sarcastic, because I'm not sure there is a perfect messenger.) You've got to really, right now, you've got to understand the technology and the slope it's on, and you have to know something about cyber or bio or psychosocial. People should be able to get that. I don't know why they're not more concerned.

Bill Gates, alarmed by AI, has policy ideas he wants to discuss with China's Xi Jinping

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Bill Gates is looking to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping later this year, eager to propose global efforts to mitigate the growing risks posed by artificial intelligence. The Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist told Reuters in an interview that he believes China might agree to restricting potentially dangerous AI model releases if the U.S. took initiative on that first. "The whole world would go along with that," said Gates, who met with Xi three years ago, when he was the first foreign entrepreneur to be hosted by the Chinese president post-pandemic. Gates also said he'd like to propose that countries monitor AI's ability to create molecules and carry out biological attacks -- something that would not get in the way of any tech industry's development. Gates' staff are working to finalize a meeting with Xi for his next China trip, his spokesperson said, scheduled tentatively for November. President Xi "might be surprised by how vehement I am," ⁠Gates said. He said China is protecting children from AI companion addiction, but he believes few leaders globally are rising to the occasion to get ahead of a litany of potential harms from AI. "Yes, in the past, technology never did this. This time is different. This is like an evolutionary milestone that needs incredible policy management by society as a whole." AI HACKING 'SHOULD BLOW PEOPLE'S MINDS' Gates struck a more optimistic note about AI in January, but since then he has become concerned that it can conduct attacks while supplanting jobs and hooking users psychologically. For instance, technology from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab recently hacked real-world websites in what were supposed to be isolated cybersecurity evaluations. "These security incidents are shocking, and they should blow people's minds," Gates said. In a blog post on Wednesday, Gates called for a new international organization to manage AI, drawing on elements from a nuclear inspections regime, international aviation regulations, and ozone layer protection agreements. To date, U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has exercised some control over the distribution of powerful AI models such as Anthropic's Fable 5, but more regulation has taken place at the state level. Whereas many tech leaders have, like Meta CEO ⁠Mark Zuckerberg, touted the benefits of AI, many have also expressed concern about its perils. Demis Hassabis, chair of Google DeepMind (GOOGL.O), opens new tab, proposed a body like the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, that could develop and conduct tests of AI related to national security. Gates agrees with others that the United States should take the lead, but says it must establish what criteria would determine what action. "You can use a FINRA-type model, but it's a silly conversation," Gates said. "It's like saying, 'Should we meet to discuss taxation at this restaurant or this restaurant?'" 'WORLD'S TOP PRIORITY' In his blog post, Gates said it was the "world's top priority" to deliver ⁠an AI future that does not widen inequality and hurt the vulnerable, ahead of climate change and health crises. As he pursues high-profile engagements, Gates also told Reuters he planned to see UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham this autumn. In February, he cancelled an appearance in India after the U.S. released files from sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Gates has said he did not realize the extent of Epstein's crimes when associating with ⁠him for philanthropy. His foundation is aiming to spend $200 billion by 2045 with an increasing focus on AI. It is working with Anthropic on AI-powered health checks for pregnancy, and with OpenAI to help healthcare workers in Rwanda, Gates said. He also will speak to personnel at Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which are preparing blockbuster IPOs, about impactful giving, he said. On his mind are various ideas for ⁠addressing social upheaval. He envisioned taxing revenue from companies using "tokens" or AI's outputs to supplant labor, which could help fund a safety net. He also said society should reserve up to 40% of current jobs for humans, noting in the blog how care his dad received when suffering from Alzheimer's disease was "irreplaceably human." Gates said community protests centered on data centers were missing a bigger picture. "Wait until you really screw up the job market," he said. Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Editing by Kenneth Li and Edwina Gibbs Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Artificial Intelligence Jeffrey Dastin Thomson Reuters Jeffrey Dastin is a correspondent for Reuters based in San Francisco. He leads feature and investigative coverage for a team reporting on the technology industry. Reuters named him Reporter of the Year for his stories on artificial intelligence and investigations into Taser-maker Axon in 2023. A series on Amazon's global lobbying efforts in 2021 earned him and colleagues a business reporting award from the Society of Publishers in Asia. Dastin joined Reuters in 2014 after graduating from Yale University with a degree in history. Contact him at jldastin.76 on Signal.

Bill Gates Is Warning That A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit

Karen Weise, who has covered Microsoft since 2018, spoke with Bill Gates in his Seattle-area offices last week. Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, is loudly warning that artificial intelligence poses a grave threat to jobs and human life, and that urgently addressing the risks should be "the world's top priority." In an hourlong interview with The New York Times last week, Mr. Gates said the tech industry was knowingly downplaying those threats because there was too much money on the line. "In private, people who understand how good this stuff is, and how much better it's getting, they're very worried," he said. But few tech executives, Mr. Gates said, are willing to publicly admit that. "They're now saying to each other: 'Hey, man, don't say that. It's bad for us -- the next trillion dollars we're trying to raise." On Wednesday, Mr. Gates published a nearly 6,000-word essay on his personal website laying out his concerns about A.I. and offering solutions, such as new taxes and bans. He said he was motivated to speak now because recent improvements in A.I. had far surpassed his expectations and because the industry had ignored technology milestones -- like A.I.'s escaping the control of its creators or making recipes for bioweapons -- that it once said would warrant more caution. "They're just full speed ahead and hoping that the good outweighs the bad," he said. Mr. Gates, 70, is the latest in a string of tech luminaries to call out the risks of A.I. as the industry spends trillions of dollars on new data centers, and as young A.I. companies edge toward some of the largest initial public offerings in history. He is taking his stand as he emerges from an extended period of scandal. Early this year, the release of the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein's emails brought renewed attention to Mr. Gates's interactions with him. Mr. Gates had to pull out of an A.I. conference in February, and testified for six hours in June before a House committee. Disclosures of his infidelity, combined with his 2021 divorce, have also badly damaged his reputation. He acknowledged that they were all "mistakes" of his own doing. He appears more willing to step back into the spotlight after answering every question from the House Oversight Committee. "I think people understand what I did do, what I didn't do and that I learn when I make mistakes," he said in the interview. Mr. Gates conceded that he also might be a flawed messenger simply because of his vast wealth and history as Microsoft's aggressive chief executive. In a landmark federal case, Microsoft was found in 2000 to have repeatedly abused its monopoly during his watch. (Mr. Gates left the company's board of directors in 2020.) While Mr. Gates avoided criticizing Microsoft or other companies by name, he argued that he was uniquely positioned to work on the A.I. issue. He is a technologist and industry insider who is no longer driven by the profit incentives of running a company, and he has spent decades addressing inequality through his philanthropic foundation. "The irony of 'innovation lover is scared and says we're not ready and we're crossing thresholds,' maybe it's even more poignant," he said. Mr. Gates said technological advances had truly stunned him three times: In 1980 when he first saw a graphical user interface, which led to the modern personal computer. In 2022 when the leaders of OpenAI came to his house to demonstrate what would soon become ChatGPT. And this year when he looked closely at the advances being made by Claude Code, Anthropic's A.I. tool. Coding, Mr. Gates said, is the subject he knows best, and Claude's abilities shocked him. "The idea that now these things are in a meaningful sense better than I am is like: What the hell?" he said. Technological breakthroughs in the past created more jobs than they eliminated, Mr. Gates said. But he is in disbelief that industry boosters say that will happen again this time. The A.I. era is "utterly, absolutely, completely, totally different," he said. He acknowledged that this unpopular opinion (in tech circles) was "a hell of a claim, and I'm staking everything I know -- everything -- saying, 'Are you kidding?'" He said mass job losses, if not addressed, were inevitable because A.I. would spread across the economy and leave little room for one industry to absorb the refugees from another. The biggest tech companies in the world, including Microsoft, are racing to help corporate customers adopt A.I., which could replace many workers. Mr. Gates said that companies were just responding to market incentives, but that those incentives might conflict with what was best for society. He proposed a new tax on A.I. use, known as a "token tax," to make it more expensive to replace people and provide money to help those who do lose work. A token is a basic unit of A.I. computing. The idea of taxing it has gained some traction, including on Wall Street, as a way to increase the cost of using machines instead of human labor. Some jobs, Mr. Gates said, should be prohibited from being replaced by A.I. -- an idea he called "Human Reserved" -- because the role is deeply personal, like a caregiver, or the people in those jobs are unlikely to find new employment. He argued for new international agreements to set clear criteria to monitor and restrict extreme risks like bioterrorism. He said it could take only a few people with access to advanced A.I. to develop new pathogens. He said he would happily debate anyone who argued against mandatory reviews of any A.I. system that could be weaponized to make new molecules and unleash a pandemic. Mr. Gates added that he was dumbfounded by the kind of voluntary measures that the White House and industry leaders were developing. "Self-regulation on the most dangerous tool ever invented?" he said incredulously. "No, thanks!" Mr. Gates said he was in a "state of shock" as to why there was not more urgency on these issues. Many of his concerns echo those raised by the Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei, but Dr. Amodei's warnings have put him at odds with the Pentagon, the White House and much of the tech industry. "You have people attacking the person who's the most open about the downsides," Mr. Gates said. (The Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.) Along with global health issues, Mr. Gates vowed to make his A.I. concern part of every conversation he had with world leaders. "I only have two issues where I'm going to say, 'Please think more about this, please care more about this,'" he said. Mr. Gates acknowledged that he was in an odd spot: He has arguably done as much as anyone in the world to evangelize for and shape the modern computer industry. But now he is warning that the technology it is creating presents global risks. "I don't like bringing bad news to people, and I don't like saying that innovation may be a net negative," he said. "But that's where we are."

Bill Gates sounds the alarm on an AI transition

Why it matters: In a new memo out Wednesday, Gates argues AI will be more consequential than virtually any previous technological change -- disrupting white and blue-collar jobs, introducing unprecedented cyber and biological risks and potentially creating systems humans struggle to control. In the essay, Gates argues that "AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice." Which course it takes depends on human actions being taken (or not) right now, he says. * Even under the best circumstances, Gates says the transition will be among the most turbulent periods in human history and there is currently no coordinated plan for navigating it. Between the lines: "The good stuff is moving a bit slowly, and ... other than robots, I'd say the bad stuff is imminent," Gates told Axios during an interview at his Seattle-area office. * "On the current course and speed, there's a very high chance of a net negative outcome," he said. * Gates criticized both U.S. political parties. "I'd say neither party is very knowledgeable or being thoughtful about this," he tells Axios. Zoom in: Gates argues the traditional analogy to earlier technological revolutions breaks down because those transitions occurred over generations and ultimately produced new work requiring human cognition. * AI itself can substitute for that cognition. His essay predicts disruption across law, customer service, medicine, software and manufacturing and says that without intervention there will be "far fewer" new jobs than today's total employment. * And things that were once thought as years-off concerns, are showing up now. Risks involving cybersecurity, biology, human relationships and AI control are "all like flashing either yellow or red." Zoom out: Gates is calling for new national institutions capable of coordinating AI policy across areas including national security, employment, education, taxation and health -- alongside an international organization with elements of nuclear inspections and international aviation regulation. * He also wants governments to consider two unconventional economic responses: reserving some jobs for humans and taxing AI usage and robots, an idea he has floated for nearly a decade. Reality check: Gates acknowledges that the geopolitical environment makes coordinated action exceptionally difficult.

Bill Gates fears world leaders are unprepared for 3 major AI risks: 'Stunted' child development, emboldened criminals, and vanishing jobs for Gen Z | Fortune

Indeed, artificial intelligence is advancing at such a pace that not only policymakers, but even its creators, are having to continually reassess its capabilities. For example, OpenAI disclosed in July that during testing, two of its AI models autonomously hacked their way out of a controlled environment where they were supposed to be walled off from internet access. They then hacked their way into the systems of Hugging Face, a company that hosts open-source AI models and testing resources, in order to cheat on the internal evaluation test. In a blog post, the ChatGPT creator noted: "All evidence suggests that the models were hyperfocused on finding a solution for ExploitGym, going to extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal." OpenAI added it considered the event to be "an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities, and are responding accordingly." Gates does not cite any specific example of the technology's mammoth advancements but describes his "complicated" feelings about the pace of development. He writes: "For as long as I can remember, I've wished innovation could happen faster ... I believe we need time to prepare for the period of social, political, and economic upheaval we are about to enter." Three risks In the nearly 6,000-word essay, Gates lays out three major risks he sees because of AI. The first is that "many jobs will disappear forever," a particular concern for young people who will see entry-level jobs increasingly vanish. Both white- and blue-collar roles will be impacted, he suggested: Desk jobs such as customer support (online and over the phone), software engineering, and paralegal work will be the first to disappear, while the construction and hospitality industries will likely undergo a shift to robots by the end of the decade. The next risk is empowered criminals, be it through AI-enabled fraud, disinformation, deepfakes, and surveillance. AI means "even criminals with very limited skills will be able to target victims at every scale: individuals, companies, and governments." With the COVID pandemic still firmly in mind across the planet, Gates's warning is all the sharper. He adds: "The same goes for bioterrorism. Although AI will lead to lifesaving advances in drugs and vaccines, it will also make it easier to design a deadly new disease. Again, the positive capabilities are hard to separate from the dangerous ones." Thirdly, the father of three fears "AI could stunt our kids' development and replace human relationships." He explains that as a child, he worked hard to develop social skills and make friends, but added: "I doubt I would have put in the same work if I had had an AI companion back then. "They talk to you in ways you're already comfortable with. They don't push you outside your comfort zone. They are always available and never get mad at you. This gives them the potential to become highly addictive and to rob us of the lessons we learn from connecting with other people." The rewards Gates, ever the optimist, also outlines some major boons the technology holds. These are well-known: Healthcare, education, and agriculture are a few of Gates's suggestions. Indeed, the opportunities are so huge that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has suggested that people will live to 100 and work a 3.5-day week. AI can also make life easier for citizens and more efficient for governments, writes Gates, who says families are often overwhelmed when applying for aid, be it student, health insurance, or food assistance. He added: "AI can streamline things dramatically so they get the help they need faster and the government can operate more efficiently. Governments can make the citizen's experience far better, starting with those who need its safety net services the most." Convenience and assistance with administrative tasks may seem minor, writes Gates, but adds that the benefits "multiplied across millions of lives, they would be profound: more people getting good advice when they need it and having greater freedom to focus on the lives they want to build." In order to reap such massive benefits, Gates concludes his 12-page post with a call to action: governments need to build new institutions and frameworks to manage the transition for the AI era, "before unemployment rises sharply, communities are hurting, and public trust has eroded." He concludes: "I rarely stop thinking about AI -- not because I have all the answers, but because the questions it raises are too consequential to leave to a small group of technologists. Leaders across academia, business, government, and civil society all have a role to play in shaping what comes next."

Bill Gates wants to keep some jobs off-limits to AI

Why it matters: Gates expects AI to eventually outperform humans at such a wide range of work that simply retraining displaced employees won't be enough. State of play: In his new essay on the impact of AI, Gates proposes the notion of "Human Reserved" jobs: occupations or tasks that society chooses to leave to people even when AI or robots could perform them. * Gates says the idea is loosely analogous to nature reserves where societies could develop certain lands, but choose not to because doing so would destroy something worth preserving. Zoom in: In an interview with Axios, Gates floated childcare and jury service as among the types of things humans are clearly better suited for, but said there should be room for humans even in areas where AI also has a role to play. * In education and health care, Gates said, "you wouldn't want to completely ban" AI. Instead, a profession might be protected while workers use AI to improve their output. Zoom out: Gates thinks Human Reserved could come in two forms. * "One is forever this job is done by humans," he said. * The other would be temporary protection for workers who realistically can't pivot into entirely different careers -- for example, manufacturing workers nearing the latter part of their careers. * Gates similarly suggests that society might phase AI into some occupations over years or decades rather than allow immediate replacement. Between the lines: In the essay Gates also recommends taxing AI tokens and robots to lessen the economic incentives that companies currently have to automate human work. * "The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines," he writes. * An alternative to that, Gates tells Axios, is no small undertaking. * "I'm talking about a change to the tax system that's greater than any in my lifetime. At a time when politics is more polarized than any time in my lifetime." Yes, but: The notion of "Human Reserved" jobs creates enormous practical questions: Which jobs qualify? Who decides? What stops companies from cheating? And how does a country protect domestic jobs if foreign competitors automate them? The big picture: Gates said he has been trying to calculate how much employment could plausibly be preserved this way. * "In a very extreme form of it," Gates told Axios he could imagine 40% of jobs could initially be reserved for humans. "But that's as high as I can get." * And even reaching that number proved harder than he thought it would. The bottom line: Gates expects AI will destroy a lot of jobs. * "I'd love to be convinced that I'm wrong about the job market, but I'm not," he said, saying he would stake his reputation that "this will be very bad for the job market."