Bill Gates is sounding the alarm on artificial intelligence.
“Is this the greatest problem humanity has ever faced?” Gates asked the Telluride Film Festival this past weekend. “That is just a fact.”
The panel, titled “AI AI AI,” was held in conjunction with the multimedia presentation “The Humanity Dilemma.” Part concert, part talk, the piece mixes live music and images with a dire warning about artificial intelligence, as part of a discussion on “what it means to stay human in the age of AI.”
The appearance comes on the heels of a recent essay Gates wrote—a 6,000-word manifesto—about the harms of artificial intelligence, which he said carries the risk of mass unemployment and major social, political, and economic upheaval across the globe.
“The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history,” he wrote. “Right now, we are not preparing adequately for that transition. If the world takes the right steps, AI will be a force for good and leave everyone better off. . . . [However] I don’t see evidence that leaders, experts, and communities are confronting the challenges adequately.
“I believe we need time to prepare for the period of social, political, and economic upheaval we are about to enter,” Gates continued. “It will hit these industries rapidly, over the course of a decade rather than a few generations. There will be some new jobs, but without the right policies there will be far fewer than exist today.”
Gates also proposed major limits on AI development, arguing that “a public democratic process that includes elected officials, policymakers, educators, health workers, local officials, and community leaders” should determine future solutions, not the AI companies themselves.
This is in stark contrast to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who penned his own essay, ostensibly arguing that the best way to minimize AI risk is to, well, make it more widely available and trust people to do good, per Gizmodo.
“The arc of human civilization has bent towards putting more power in people’s hands to live and shape the world in the ways we believe are best,” Zuckerberg wrote on Meta’s website in August, along with the release of the company’s recent AI, Muse Glimmer. “Superintelligence holds the promise of giving everyone that power, and building a positive future for everyone. . . . Still, it is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom.”
Gates’s warning comes in the wake of a major AI breach, in which autonomous OpenAI models went rogue, coordinating a multiday hack of Hugging Face on a shared unsanctioned “message board.”