If A.I. starts to replace jobs en masse I propose we tax the companies profiting from this at a rate of 95% so we can finance welfare and Universal Basic Income schemes.
We need to be aware that said companies and the people behind them will do anything in their power, including bribing politicians, to prevent this and to keep the money they believe are they're entitled to.
I even believe the Big Tech bigwigs have long foreseen this and are quietly prodding our society towards an authoritarian regime where people have no say so they can keep their moonies.
I like the thought, but it seems daunting. What about global competition? If some other countries have few or no such taxes, how do you deal with that? Do you outlaw the outsourcing of all white collar work? Outlaw all remote work as well? Will you have to suppress a local black market for intellectual labor, built on self-hosted open source models?
> I even believe the Big Tech bigwigs have long foreseen this and are quietly prodding our society towards an authoritarian regime where people have no say so they can keep their moonies.
“Quietly”? They’re not even subtle about it! Hard to get those types of news here, though, as submissions in that direction tend to be heavily flagged, no matter how tame the comments.
> I even believe the Big Tech bigwigs have long foreseen this and are quietly prodding our society towards an authoritarian regime where people have no say so they can keep their moonies.
"In terms of equity, AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice. The challenge is monumental. Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history. How will we use this technology to make the world a fairer place and keep it from widening the divide between rich and poor? "
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One look at who is in the driver's seat should give you the answer to this question. The initial roll-out will, by very deliberate design, put dynamite in the divide and set it off. This has happened before.
The industrial revolution was very similar. Initially, workers suffered. Conditions were unsafe. Pay was poor. Worker rights were non-existent. Things got worse for the majority before social change caught up and imposed a more equitable distribution of the dividends.
We should be under no illusion that this time will be any different. The rich and powerful are no less selfish than they were a quarter millennium ago. It is possible to get ahead of the problem, but the people running AI companies won't be the ones to do it. Governments are inclined to do what the people paying for their election campaigns want, but should be aware that standing up for inequality will only make things worse for them when the tides of social change start rolling in on them.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
What put the fear of god in governments, was the great depression(which is an indirect a result of the industrial revolution), terrible leaders rising because of it, and WWII as the result.
We already have terrible leaders in many places, war(mostly economic, some physical), and that's even without the huge unemployment wave that is coming.
Nothing says "social change" like building a Flock of predictive-surveillance cameras capable of spotting the revolt before the flock even knows it’s a flock.
I think it's more competition for labor. Why is anyone paid above minimum wage? It's not through charity or "fear" that employees will revolt. It's that there's competition for that labor.
Suppose a worker is worth $20 per hour to a capitalist. How much should they pay? As little as possible, sure, but anything up to $20 per hour is worth it. You'll hire up to that point to maximize profit. Suppose you hand somewhere at $15 per hour, another capitalist will look to lure your employees away by paying them more.
Of course pay isn't the only consideration when working. Workers consider things like paid time off, benefits and how much they like their boss and coworkers. These are all part of the bargain.
It wasn't "society". It was competition. Consider the Ford $5 day, where Ford doubled wages because he realized turnover and poor morale cost him money:
> Ford workers disliked the new assembly line methods so much that by late 1913, labor turnover was 380 percent. The company's announcement to pay five dollars for an eight-hour day compared to the previous rate of $2.34 for a nine-hour day made many workers willing to submit to the relentless discipline of the line in return for such high wages.
> One look at who is in the driver's seat should give you the answer to this question.
I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding the question Gates is asking here. He’s not asking “how this going to play out?”, he’s asking “how can we impact how this will play out?”
He makes specific proposals like AI token and robot taxes. I just wish people being cynical would at least comment on possible solutions.
I think AI taxes potentially make sense. His idea of Human Reserved is fascinating. It might not be his idea but I’ve never heard it described like that before
Is it cynical, or simply realistic, to recognize that AI CEO's won't ask for this kind of policy, and governments won't force anything upon the AI sector until things get very bad?
That, in my view, is a much bigger problem. We know what's coming but we won't do anything about it until after a lot of suffering occurs. Why can't we be more proactive?
> I just wish people being cynical would at least comment on possible solutions.
This has been bugging me damn near every time people talk about this stuff. Any attempt to propose or even discuss a solution is met with an endless wave of cynicism, sarcasm, and epic burn clapbacks... and usually nothing further.
And I'll be the first to admit that finding a "solution" is hard! It's almost like it's an unprecedented technological change! But could we at least be honest and admit it's hard, or are we just going to keep making fun of anyone who tries to talk about it and then do nothing?
This time will be different, because the oligarchs think that when the people finally come for them with pitchforks, they'll have an army of terminators to hide behind. That's why they're going YOLO full mask off.
> The industrial revolution was very similar. Initially, workers suffered. Conditions were unsafe. Pay was poor. Worker rights were non-existent. Things got worse for the majority before social change caught up and imposed a more equitable distribution of the dividends.
> We should be under no illusion that this time will be any different. The rich and powerful are no less selfish than they were a quarter millennium ago.
Yeah, it could be worse. During the industrial revolution, the rich and powerful absolutely needed workers (and lots of them) to run the machines, and that gave the workers power.
The whole point of the AI revolution is to no need workers anymore, or far fewer of them.
> It is possible to get ahead of the problem, but the people running AI companies won't be the ones to do it.
It's possible, but dumbass software engineers missed their best chance, because they were too busy misunderstanding themselves as capitalists and embracing their bosses' libertarianism thinking, when they should have been unionizing to consolidate their former economic power.
It goes back to the industrial revolution and every revolution before and after. There was a point where they thought a majority of people would be working as switchboard operators and then telephone switching came along. Horses to cars, etc.
Jobs transition, new space is created, people are caught in tbe crossfire of supply and demand curves. Incan agree the bullwhip of this one is going to be aggressive.
I think it is a mistake to bet on AI as a driver of meaningful growth in a commercial capacity in the current state. When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium.
I think the world at large is "learning on the job" what data scientists and others in ai have known for a long, several decades long, time have already known.
That seems to be the crux here. You think it will be, I (and a lot of other people) aren't sure it will. If new space for jobs are created, I am certain we'll be fine long term.
What do you think will happen if it isn't (I know you have strong evidence for and reasons to believe it will be, but just indulge the hypothetical)?
I can indulge the hypothetical and I appreciate your openness to engage in both sides.
I think as you stated, human nature and history is where I am looking at this from. People have a tendency to be unable to sit and do nothing for extended periods of time. I believe we are purpose driven but purpose is pretty loosely defined here.
Indulging the hypothetical (and arguably realistic in some circumstances) that AI replaces a tier of repeatable tasks I believe it would work from the bottom up. Tasks that are extremely repeatable would probably be gone 1:1 and it would be a sliding ratio as complexity increased where having human intervention as a backup becomes justifiable.
This would create a squeeze on the labor force which would bring up the very real and fair question of "How is it that I am unable to survive daily life when 100 - 200 years ago none of this automation / technology existed."
I think this could drive a sort of re-examining of what exists RE: a very inefficient and flawed system with a large amount of people possessing a lot of anxiety and time on their hands. It would be like the Eye of Sauron made up of those who were caught in the crossfire.
On the other side of the haves and have-nots I can imagine there being a very Harrison Bergeron style mindset of trying to popularize pacification until the next great innovation just solves itself.
On the extreme end, I just cannot imagine euthanasia, genocide, or population control schemes. It feels like we have come so far. How could it be possible we regress that far? I could imagine myself not wanting to live through any part of that. This seems like a very extreme and existential point to reach. I am trying to keep my thoughts pinned closer to biological and historical drivers.
I think we are hormone driven chemistry sets. I believe we respond to stimuli. I find it hard to believe anyone at any level could shut off that drive at such a massive scale and accurately predict the other side.
This is potentially much more upending since it would put hundreds of millions of people out of work and concentrate all wealth at literally a handful of individuals. We could lead this towards a beneficial scenario with proper taxation, but the individuals who stand to gain will do anything in their power to prevent this.
> When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium.
This is asserted without evidence. There is absolutely no proof that AI requires humans in the loop to function or improve itself.
Compare it with Deepmind's go-playing program, AlphaGo, which mainly involved training a neural network on a large database of high-level human games. It defeated one of the top-ranked players in the world, Lee Sedol, but arguably it was drawing from human experience just like you described.
But it didn't stop there. After that, Deepmind developed AlphaGo Zero, a version that was trained exclusively through self-play, with no human feedback in the loop. That's what you would call "AI inputs coming from AI outputs" but it didn't have the result of “resulting in delirium”: instead, it became orders of magnitudes stronger than the original version (which it defeated in a 100 to 0 competition after 3 days of training).
This shows that AI can improve itself without having access to any human knowledge, and indeed transcend human performance by orders of magnitudes. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that general AI cannot improve itself the same way.
People who claim otherwise are engaging in wishful thinking; they just assert their conclusion, but have no rational arguments to back it up.
You have no evidence that self improvement can work at generalized tasks. Go is a simple game with a clear win condition, but deep strategy and near infinite permutations of how a game plays out. Winning a game of Go is a task well suited to machine learning.
One might say you are engaging in wishful thinking by believing it’ll just continue to work across all domains. The world is much bigger than a Go board.
AlphaZero works in simple and fully observable environments like board games.
RLVR for LLMs works for coding and math domains which can be verified by code.
AlphaZero, RLVR and other RL methods don't work for learning dextrous manipulation for robotics, for example. Learning in robotics depends on human data.
Both programs had programmed in to their routines the rules of go (and for Alpha Zero the rules of chess and shogi). The programs then followed an optimization program. Absent the extremely specific "rules of this game" set by a human none of the programs work.
Amusingly, all three games are in the game theory sense trivial because they provably have a correct solution (probably a draw for chess), but the search space is so large that it is unlikely we will ever collectively invest the resources to discover the answer.
You are referring to gans which have complete understanding of the rules and an api interface to leverage interacting with the world.
While I think there could be an argument made here you are mixing apples and rocks if you believe ChatGPT is using gans.
I hate to be that person but you are showing that you are unable to differentiate between linear regressions, clustering, gradient descent, and generative adversarial networks. You are over your ski-tips and don't see itc
I believe we are on autopilot towards essentially free renewable electricity, and so this doesn't feel like a big concern when held against the potential end-of-humanity potential that AI has.
That doesn't seem like an actual quote in the original article, but this a fair point to bring up and a reminder that Gates has been problematic on his views on climate.
First, in the essay he mentions "Using AI, low-income farmers will soon be able to get better advice about all these things than even the richest farmers get today and increase their output substantially.". There may be some truth in this, but it's worth reminding that this is more of a 'productivist' worldview, and historically productivity gains in agricultural practices have benefitted farmers that were already wealthy (see books like The Globalization of Wheat by Marci Baranski [1] on the Green Revolution where "Borlaug’s new technologies ultimately privileged wealthier farmers, despite assurances to politicians that these new crops would thrive in diverse geographies and benefit all farmers").
Gates has also been criticized in the past for being influenced by figures like Bjorn Lomborg, where he had a (now-deleted) essay [2] with him, and there's a decent thread by energy entrepreneur Jigar Shah on Gates being off on climate issues for 15 years [3]
The Green Revolution most certainly did improve the lives of tens of millions of low income farmers in India. The high yield crops also permanently removed the spectre of famine from India, saving tens of millions from starvation.
To retcon this into “only rich farmers benefited” is weird. Certainly there are many rich farmers out there. Of course their incomes increased when they could plant more productive crops. But so what if they make money? They’re feeding everyone!
Those emissions are nothing. Its a drop in the bucket compared with other industrial uses. A 50% reduction would change nothing, reduction to 0 would change nothing.
The observer (Mr Gates) is inside the tech ecosystem, so his observations would be colored by the pace of things happening around him, in the tech space.
The world outside has much more friction and many other things going on. Tech had a wild run during his time because the American priorities at that time, favored it. There is no guarantee that tech would have same priority in a world that might get into more basic struggles.
If AI could affect jobs, that itself would work against it as it would cause basic struggles. Ultimately the world has to oscillate towards an equilibrium, acknowledging all forces from all corners. World is not a tech lab.
I believe he still has the power to change things at Microsoft, but he dares not to since it would angry shareholders who want this Musical Chairs game to continue.
> But the reliability problem is being fixed quickly, as researchers create models that can check their own work and improve themselves. Soon they will be substantially better than humans at many tasks.
Yes, no.
They don't. They just push probabilities higher. The tech is non-deterministic.
Humans are also non-deterministic, for all practical purposes, and the more of them you need to build some piece of software, the harder it can get to keep the likelihood of issues low.
I'm not saying it will happen, but at least it's not inconceivable that LLMs could surpass them in this calculation more and more often.
If AI is really that powerful, shouldn't someone like Gates be able to end hunger and homelessness with a one-time capital expenditure? Somehow "give people jobs" is the primary problem he wants to solve, not ending poverty. It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.
>end hunger and homelessness with a one-time capital expenditure?
A significant percentage of the world's hungry live under warlords, militias and dictatorships that would simply kill anyone trying to peacefully give their subjects food.
Unless you're proposing AI military interventionism, you cannot fix this.
Homelessness on the other hand is mostly a mental health and drug addiction problem. Fixing it, in many cases, would require violating the consent/wishes of the homeless person.
The world's biggest problems, unfortunately, cannot be solved by throwing money at them. A lot of rich individuals, NGOs, and nation states have tried.
> Homelessness on the other hand is mostly a mental health and drug addiction problem
No it's not. It's not a coincidence that homelessness only skyrocketed at the same time housing price took off to the point even professionals are spending half of their salary on rent. And if you look at the statistics you'll see addiction is a widespread issue but homelessness is not — WV and NM has some of the worst overdose deaths and the least homelessness.
Please for god's sake let's address the elephant in the room for a second. It's the housing prices.
I'm strictly talking about developed countries where we have rule of law and it's trivial to house and feed people if you have free housing and free food. I'm not suggesting AI can solve warlords, I'm not suggesting anyone should even try. But you don't need to solve drug addiction or mental health to solve homelessness if you can build apartments for $1/sq.ft. and provide food for pennies per day. You don't need to put people into make-work jobs to justify their existence.
Look, either AI is going to magically solve all our problems or it isn't. If you're in the AI maximalist camp, then you better have an explanation for how AI is going to fix warlords or it's hard for me to take your singularity seriously.
What if he's right, and AI+Robots can do everything?
We still need to provide for all the humans. We will need to come up with a new system of distributing the world's resources that doesn't depend on "jobs" and allows the world's population access to the resources they need to live.
That's going to be very difficult, in the "we have to have a war about this" sense, traditionally.
They probably didn't read it. The Parent comment suggests Bill is saying AI is wildly powerful, more precisely Parent comment is implying Bill has ulterior motives because AI isn't that powerful yet as he fear-mongers.
The actual text Bill wrote is more about highlighting upcoming problems and convincing governments to work together on potential harms coming soon.
He is planning to leverage AI with significant capital expenditures:
> The Gates Foundation has 19 years left of the 20 years in which it will spend its remaining $200 billion. AI will help it achieve its ambitious goals by both accelerating the discovery of vaccines and medicines for HIV, TB, malaria, and malnutrition and helping the healthcare workforce and patients know how to use those tools. The foundation’s goals include cutting the number of children who die every year in half again, as was done from 2000 to 2024. All of our work, not just health but also agriculture and education, will take full advantage of AI.
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I think "maintaining the working poor" is a strange misread of "give people jobs". His point is that people get a ton of meaning out of their work in our current capitalist system, and regardless of whether or not we change our system in the long term, if we don't do something about jobs in the short term, there will be a civil crisis:
> In a capitalist society, employment is the way most people get the money they need to pay for the basics of life as well as being a key source of dignity and social connection.
> When a community has high unemployment, the ripple effects can be pervasive. Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses. Now imagine similar pressures on both white-collar and blue-collar workers nationwide.
> Waiting until people are already displaced or underemployed will be too late. AI is a structural challenge to the way our economy is organized, and it requires thinking and action now.
Ending poverty is a purely mechanical problem, with very straightforward solutions if you have robots that can do any mechanical task. You don't need to give anyone a job, you just need to give them food and shelter. (Ideally also medicine, but it sounds like that part at least he's thinking about, although again, perhaps not for anyone who doesn't already have it.)
Curing diseases and making people feel fulfilled are great goals, but they're not the primary ones in my mind. They are in Gates' mind because those are the biggest challenges he has personally experienced in his life.
Making the structural changes to our economy should be trivial if AI works as well as he's supposing it will. We won't need an economy at all, not to solve the problems caused by unemployment. (And that's the thing, is unemployment is not the actual problem, it is a cause of problems, but AGI would give us easy alternatives to the fundamentally unattainable goal of full employment.)
I still think there is a contradiction he glossed over. In a capitalist society, jobs have a dual role that is sometimes paradox: For workers and employees, jobs are a source of income, skill, status and participation; for the (capitalist) state, a job is often a justification why the worker deserves to exist. But for the employer, jobs are a cost center and expenditure that should be minimized - that was why this tech was developed in the first place.
The state papers over that contradiction with the idea of perpetual economic growth, where the economic activity simply grows so fast that more jobs are created than are lost by efficiency improvements.
Gates is somehow expecting that "we" (whoever that is) agree just like that to keep certain jobs from being replaced by AI, even if they could. But that would go against all the forced and incentives that make up the dynamic of the current system.
One is the obvious one, to produce things. AI can somewhat help with that, although less than you might think because it's largely producing knowledge output rather than physical things. If AI lets one knowledge worker do the work of 10, the effect of that is to free up 9 knowledge workers to take up manual labor, it's not to make manual laborers 10x more productive.
The second purpose is to distract people from attempting to work on their own interests and instead corral them into working for others'. You see examples of this in the form of acquihires (where they obviously don't need you to do the work, they already have a competing product, but they do need to take your product off the market), and in bullshit jobs, and in think tanks and consulting firms and legal machinery. It's a form of social control and a means to maintain social order, not a requirement for actual productivity. When you don't give people a job to do, they start working for their own interests, and their own interests frequently conflict with others. And we've seen that over and over again: the Great Depression nearly led to a fascist coup in the U.S. [1] and did result in fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain, and large communist movements in France and China. The COVID pandemic and subsequent lockdowns led to widespread protests and civil unrest in the U.S. and other countries.
Popular discourse concentrates almost exclusively on the first purpose, because the second one is icky to talk about. In reality most people are individually better off being independently wealthy and not working, but society can only absorb so many free agents with their own ideas and wills to power. (This is also why retirement and stay-at-home parenting are broadly institutionalized: it's okay for people to not work when they no longer have the energy to work, it's only dangerous when people are not working and yet have the energy to do things other than working). But the second reason actually has more explanatory power. If you assume that the true reason for employment is to take people out of the competitive will-to-power market, lots and lots of irrational moves suddenly make sense, like high-paid executives, bullshit jobs, bureaucratic incompetence, projects where billions are invested and then the whole thing is canceled, competing internal divisions, people not getting fired for doing nothing, etc. The whole point is for them to do nothing.
There's a Chesterton's Fence [2] issue at work here. Many people, particularly young people, grow up with the first explanation for work and take it at face value, and then a new technology comes around that saves all this work and they're like "Of course this is a good idea! I want to be part of it!" But if the actual purpose of work is to distract people from pursuing their own interests, this is incredibly dangerous. The actual consequence is going to be widespread unrest and quite possibly war.
>It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.
This is the foundation of the economy. AN engine needs energy to keep going and workers are that energy. AI serves to automate a lot of that energy... but this leads to a side effect.
The side effect is that the economy is a self feedback loop, as workers not only run the engine but they also create the fuel that they themselves run on. If workers aren't working and AI has replaced them then what where are companies getting money from if workers can no longer buy things from the company? This is the fundamental loop of how an economy works... money gets paid to workers, workers spend the money and the loop continues and the economy self improves... If workers are replaced the economy no longer works.
You're addressing a flaw and an imperfection in the existing infrastructure (poverty),The article is talking about the very engine that maintains society itself which in theory can completely break if AI is introduced.
I don't know if it will ACTUALLY break, the circumstances surrounding all of this are very very complex that no one can fully predict the outcome but the theory behind it is legit and much more significant then a poverty issue.
Gates is worth about $100B, Elon Musk about $850B. Let's call it $1T altogether. That would be at most about $115 per human on Earth (~8.5B humans). Not sure that is sufficient to "end hunger and homelessness."
Your calculation only makes sense if every one of those 8.5B humans is suffering from hunger and homelessness. Somewhere around 1 in 1000 people are homeless (https://worldmetrics.org/global-homelessness-statistics/), and 1 in 12 or so has experienced "hunger" some time in the past year (https://www.fao.org/hunger/en/). Obviously the numbers depend on how you define "homelessness" and "hunger", but in any case this multiplies the $ that could be used to help individuals by those factors. Between $1000 (hunger) and $115,000 (homelessness) may not sound like a lot, but when your yearly income is around $1000, it can mean a lot.
Does anyone else feel incredibly nostalgic for the time when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were the richest people on earth? I remember feeling pretty good about the fact that they were trying to do so much good, and about the giving pledge. Things feel so different now.
Few people were more vicious than Gates when he was running Microsoft. Maybe Larry Ellison but Gates was smarter and more cunning. I don't feel nostalgic about those days and Gates is just trying to buy his way into heaven and a positive view on his wikipedia page.
No because Bill Gates was hanging out with Jeffery Epstein that entire time. I also feel like people forgot his insanely evil business practices from the 80s and 90s? Bill Gates has always been one of the worst people out there. Every bit as bad as Musk. It's a big club, we're just not in it.
There was a lot of PR, but the money Gates and Buffet gave away, the foundations they created, the attention they drummed up for various charities and causes is certainly not to be scoffed at.
I'm sure they could have done more with less fanfare, but you seem to be setting the bar at "fixing the world's problems", which seems unfair. They have undoubtedly changed more lives than I'll ever manage to.
If you’re one of the people wondering why there’s an enormous backlash to AI, here’s your answer: “this thing we’re building is going to he fucking terrible and ruin your life. Please give us all your money to build it.”
It’s exactly the same set of questions and challenges as with nuclear power
Nuclear power is one of the most amazing magical things on the planet but nuclear weapons present a massive challenge to social coordination. So maybe we should sit as a society and try to figure out how to manage that instead of just freak out and burn all of our own faces off because we can’t handle complex conversations.
No? Nuclear never had those massive valuations. Did not hyped itself this ridiculous way. Was not forced down on everyone. And the vision of nuclear power was not "make humans obsolete".
We did not had nuclearmaxxing. We did not had doomtrolling from nuclear companies.
> It’s exactly the same set of questions and challenges as with nuclear power
I'm not sure "provide cheap and plentiful power that may be risky if not managed correctly" is really on the same level as "replace all human labor we possibly can"
I agree with you that ideally we would coordinate and cooperate better, but the sad problem (the prisoner's dilemma, really) is that some (many? most? all?) people will not coordinate or cooperate no matter what, especially if they have an opportunity to get ahead by not cooperating. As long as people like that exist we have to find ways to work with them or work around them
It doesn't help that people with the most wealth seem like they mostly have that sort of personality
I am no longer and will never again be interested in Bill Gates’ opinion about anything. He needs to retire. He’s a sclerotic representative of what needs to be left behind.
Thank you for your contributions, Bill. You’ve done enough.
But Bill stopped being involved in Microsoft’s day to day business over a decade ago. And he’s making valid arguments that don’t require us to trust him. Do you not think labor disruption, cyberattacks, and mass surveillance are big risks from powerful AI?
I think it will be seen similar to the crypto craze to be honest. People on this very site, with an actual reputation, were telling us non stop how we were losers who were going to be left behind and stay poor. They never had to apologize for being obnoxious when that didn’t happen
Comparing AI to crypto makes zero sense. We get tremendous use from AI right now, while 2 decades after invention of crypto there are still basically zero legitimate use cases. I repeat - the utility of AI is not some hypothetical but something that happens right now at very large scale (so please don't reply with something in line "well, crypto was supposed to have lots of uses also").
I spent about $200 on openai tokens today to solve a seriously hard distributed systems problem that would have taken me probably three weeks to understand, let alone fix.
Crypto only ever allowed me to buy drugs over the internet. I'm not really buying this argument.
Or maybe it's not just a craze and we'll soon look back and think "I wonder what we might've done differently if we'd been clear-eyed about what was happening."
Show me a person who truly revised their priors to put forward a novel solution to AI that isn't just "do the thing that I like and that benefits me in some way". The discourse around all this is a mix of quasi-religious beliefs (pro and con) and blatant opportunism. For Dario and Sam, the solution is "give us a monopoly on this tech". For Gates, it's "create an supranational organization with unprecedented taxation and regulatory powers" - world AI police, presumably staffed by technocrats like him.
What's your take? Do the ideas put forward by Gates strike you as worth pursuing? What are the trade-offs - how can they go wrong?
I've tried to type this up a couple times, each time backing out because at the end of the day, I really don't give a rats fart about anything Gates has to say. I just wish he would disappear.
I mean, I'm as opensource as they come: not used windows since '98, despise microsoft and mostly everything he's done in business. But lets be fair, he moved the needle forwards, and after he retired he's done some fairly good shit around malaria and so on. I don't really begrudge him, if it wasn't him, it would have been some other wanker. We are where we are, better to just let go of the hate.
It's a fairly concise description of the challenges ahead, and hopefully some people read it and think a bit. He didn't have to write it, I'm glad he did.
640k ought be enough for this AI. I'm not sure takes like these are helpful. It's widely acknowledged that this is a technological shift, like electricity, like industrialization, etc. It could be (good or bad) but most likely (good AND bad). Does anyone really believe, sincerely, that AI will be the great equalizer? It's a hilarious proposition. They are working their hardest to make sure that its not imo.
Sandbags against a tsunami. When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out?
What we need is deep thinking on the implications and make the default way forward one where we want to go. In other words, we build a channel for the flood waters, not a wall. Creating a role for "somebody to deal with AI issues" is one of those hand-wavvy upper management moves that looks defensible but simply passes the buck to someone who structurally lacks the agency to actual move the needle.
> When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out?
the only thing i can think of was when that Chinese scientist produced gene edited human babies. He was pretty much excommunicated from the scientific community and, eventually, spent some time in jail.
AI, on the other hand, has a huge profit potential and way too far out of the bag to go back in. To quote the movie Terminator, "it will never stop".
Yes. We can decide not to do bad things. Globally. Occasionally, it takes some time to figure out if something is bad. Especially when there's money to be made. But when we do, we can and have stopped doing them.
What surprises me even more is why Bill Gates writes this kind of bizarre, low-quality nonsense in the first place. What purpose does it serve? It’s so obviously shallow that it influences nothing and adds nothing to the conversation.
"A lot of people are skeptical of AI because it makes mistakes. But what's going to happen when it stops making mistakes??? It'll change the world!"
Honestly I suspect he's probably just cynically talking his book. All of this "AI is scary good / it'll be even scarier gooder soon" is no less advertising than slapping a cigarette logo on a racing car.
AI are improving their capacity at blazingly fast rate. Is noticing that AI psychosis? I'd say that believing that we are at the peak of LLM capabilities is some kind of psychosis due to large dose copium inhalation.
>The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history. 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.
It will be a force for good. But like all evolutionary steps the path to good will be paved with darkness.
The very existence of humanity and life itself rests on the foundation of natural selection. Humanity will be better, it will get better but before we get there... there will be a culling.
It's an unfortunate truth. We all might be culled.
Bill Gates, convicted monopolist and friend to Epstein, is always looking to burnish his legacy, but he’s too unimaginative. He needs to spend his fortune ending aging, not duplicating government efforts and trying to be a pundit.
I'm sorry. I absolutely do not trust Bill Gates. His history of ruthless, cutthroat tactics in the 90s is not easily forgotten and when he proposes things like international organizations to audit everyone's AI[1] I can't help but question his motives.
I also don't understand what gives him the moral standing to propose a solution at all. He's not the fucking pope but a ruthless tech businessman with vested financial interest in the technology involved. He should stick to his lane.
[1]
> But even a country that gets its own house in order will still be exposed to risks that cross borders. This is why an international organization will need to be built in parallel.
> It will be unlike any other institution we have ever created, though it can follow the model of some existing systems. There’s an inspections regime for nuclear weapons, regulations for international aviation, and agreements that protect the ozone layer. A new global organization for AI will need elements of all three and more.
> ruthless tech businessman with vested financial interest in the technology involved
Isn't that past-tense? What's his financial interest these days? He still owns a small amount of MSFT, but he doesn't exactly have control over the corporation any more. I imagine Nadella always answers his calls, but I'd bet most CEOs will make time to take a call from Bill.
Interesting that you chose the pope as a positive control. I'd say that taken the whole history of papacy into question, there is no particular reason to trust the pope either.
All his good things (possibly help medicine! agriculture! government!) involve a belief in ever-increasing superintelligence and so much "hope" and optimimusm and may not ever exist.
All his negative things (increase of fraud, skill atrophy, cyberattacks, removing employment, consolidation of capital and wealth) exist currently now with AI as it is.
How long will negatives outweigh the positives? And will those positives ever actually come to fruition? How anyone (who is not a sociopath and expects to be one of those pyramid tops) can see a bright future is beyond my pessimism and sense of reality as it is now.
We should not be listening to a man who drugged his wife with Epstein supplied antibiotics after getting an STD (among many, many other bad things he's done).
Looking at the exceedingly long history of someone's immoral actions and deeds isn't a "1-bit value judgement". The guy literally teamed up with a pedophile pimp foreign spy to drug his wife. I'll pass on hearing his thoughts about literally anything.
It's up to us, the public, to defend our society from deteriorating. There's no reason to defend Epstein's billionaire friends, you have nothing to gain from that.
I don’t think so. I think we’re past the point of rapidly increasing population in most of the world at this point (aside from sub sharan Africa which will change soon as well). I don’t think the current low birth rate has anything to do with a resource cap.
"In my second one, which I started full time in 2008, I am giving back the wealth I made at Microsoft with the goal of making the world a healthier, better educated, and more equitable place."
Like inventing waterless toilets when people just need access to clean water ?
The sad story is that we don't need innovation, we need better politics.
Oh and he could open source windows, that would make us more equitable for sure.
If A.I. starts to replace jobs en masse I propose we tax the companies profiting from this at a rate of 95% so we can finance welfare and Universal Basic Income schemes.
We need to be aware that said companies and the people behind them will do anything in their power, including bribing politicians, to prevent this and to keep the money they believe are they're entitled to.
I even believe the Big Tech bigwigs have long foreseen this and are quietly prodding our society towards an authoritarian regime where people have no say so they can keep their moonies.
I like the thought, but it seems daunting. What about global competition? If some other countries have few or no such taxes, how do you deal with that? Do you outlaw the outsourcing of all white collar work? Outlaw all remote work as well? Will you have to suppress a local black market for intellectual labor, built on self-hosted open source models?
> I even believe the Big Tech bigwigs have long foreseen this and are quietly prodding our society towards an authoritarian regime where people have no say so they can keep their moonies.
“Quietly”? They’re not even subtle about it! Hard to get those types of news here, though, as submissions in that direction tend to be heavily flagged, no matter how tame the comments.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411762
> I even believe the Big Tech bigwigs have long foreseen this and are quietly prodding our society towards an authoritarian regime where people have no say so they can keep their moonies.
That's been obvious for a while.
"In terms of equity, AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice. The challenge is monumental. Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history. How will we use this technology to make the world a fairer place and keep it from widening the divide between rich and poor? "
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One look at who is in the driver's seat should give you the answer to this question. The initial roll-out will, by very deliberate design, put dynamite in the divide and set it off. This has happened before.
The industrial revolution was very similar. Initially, workers suffered. Conditions were unsafe. Pay was poor. Worker rights were non-existent. Things got worse for the majority before social change caught up and imposed a more equitable distribution of the dividends.
We should be under no illusion that this time will be any different. The rich and powerful are no less selfish than they were a quarter millennium ago. It is possible to get ahead of the problem, but the people running AI companies won't be the ones to do it. Governments are inclined to do what the people paying for their election campaigns want, but should be aware that standing up for inequality will only make things worse for them when the tides of social change start rolling in on them.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
> social change caught up and imposed a more equitable distribution of the dividends.
That’s a very nice way to say “the workers put the fear of God in the heart of capital owners, and lots of people died”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Railroad_Strike_of_1877
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canut_revolts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asturian_Revolution_of_1934
etc.
What put the fear of god in governments, was the great depression(which is an indirect a result of the industrial revolution), terrible leaders rising because of it, and WWII as the result.
We already have terrible leaders in many places, war(mostly economic, some physical), and that's even without the huge unemployment wave that is coming.
Which I'm not sure it happens that often anymore because it's easier to just complain on social media
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Nothing says "social change" like building a Flock of predictive-surveillance cameras capable of spotting the revolt before the flock even knows it’s a flock.
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I think it's more competition for labor. Why is anyone paid above minimum wage? It's not through charity or "fear" that employees will revolt. It's that there's competition for that labor.
Suppose a worker is worth $20 per hour to a capitalist. How much should they pay? As little as possible, sure, but anything up to $20 per hour is worth it. You'll hire up to that point to maximize profit. Suppose you hand somewhere at $15 per hour, another capitalist will look to lure your employees away by paying them more.
Of course pay isn't the only consideration when working. Workers consider things like paid time off, benefits and how much they like their boss and coworkers. These are all part of the bargain.
It wasn't "society". It was competition. Consider the Ford $5 day, where Ford doubled wages because he realized turnover and poor morale cost him money:
> Ford workers disliked the new assembly line methods so much that by late 1913, labor turnover was 380 percent. The company's announcement to pay five dollars for an eight-hour day compared to the previous rate of $2.34 for a nine-hour day made many workers willing to submit to the relentless discipline of the line in return for such high wages.
https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/sets/detail...
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So, dust off those guillotines?
> One look at who is in the driver's seat should give you the answer to this question.
I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding the question Gates is asking here. He’s not asking “how this going to play out?”, he’s asking “how can we impact how this will play out?”
He makes specific proposals like AI token and robot taxes. I just wish people being cynical would at least comment on possible solutions.
I think AI taxes potentially make sense. His idea of Human Reserved is fascinating. It might not be his idea but I’ve never heard it described like that before
Is it cynical, or simply realistic, to recognize that AI CEO's won't ask for this kind of policy, and governments won't force anything upon the AI sector until things get very bad?
That, in my view, is a much bigger problem. We know what's coming but we won't do anything about it until after a lot of suffering occurs. Why can't we be more proactive?
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> I just wish people being cynical would at least comment on possible solutions.
This has been bugging me damn near every time people talk about this stuff. Any attempt to propose or even discuss a solution is met with an endless wave of cynicism, sarcasm, and epic burn clapbacks... and usually nothing further.
And I'll be the first to admit that finding a "solution" is hard! It's almost like it's an unprecedented technological change! But could we at least be honest and admit it's hard, or are we just going to keep making fun of anyone who tries to talk about it and then do nothing?
Sigh. What can you do, I guess.
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This time will be different, because the oligarchs think that when the people finally come for them with pitchforks, they'll have an army of terminators to hide behind. That's why they're going YOLO full mask off.
<s>Get the Flock out of here with those ideas, that's conspiracy thinking; those poor CEOs only want what's best for us</s>
> The industrial revolution was very similar. Initially, workers suffered. Conditions were unsafe. Pay was poor. Worker rights were non-existent. Things got worse for the majority before social change caught up and imposed a more equitable distribution of the dividends.
> We should be under no illusion that this time will be any different. The rich and powerful are no less selfish than they were a quarter millennium ago.
Yeah, it could be worse. During the industrial revolution, the rich and powerful absolutely needed workers (and lots of them) to run the machines, and that gave the workers power.
The whole point of the AI revolution is to no need workers anymore, or far fewer of them.
> It is possible to get ahead of the problem, but the people running AI companies won't be the ones to do it.
It's possible, but dumbass software engineers missed their best chance, because they were too busy misunderstanding themselves as capitalists and embracing their bosses' libertarianism thinking, when they should have been unionizing to consolidate their former economic power.
I feel this is merely stating the obvious.
It goes back to the industrial revolution and every revolution before and after. There was a point where they thought a majority of people would be working as switchboard operators and then telephone switching came along. Horses to cars, etc.
Jobs transition, new space is created, people are caught in tbe crossfire of supply and demand curves. Incan agree the bullwhip of this one is going to be aggressive.
I think it is a mistake to bet on AI as a driver of meaningful growth in a commercial capacity in the current state. When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium.
I think the world at large is "learning on the job" what data scientists and others in ai have known for a long, several decades long, time have already known.
> new space is created
That seems to be the crux here. You think it will be, I (and a lot of other people) aren't sure it will. If new space for jobs are created, I am certain we'll be fine long term.
What do you think will happen if it isn't (I know you have strong evidence for and reasons to believe it will be, but just indulge the hypothetical)?
Yes that’s the crux of the risk - will new space be created
On one hand. We’ve never had a technological revolution that didn’t yield more jobs
On the other hand, Terminator
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I can indulge the hypothetical and I appreciate your openness to engage in both sides.
I think as you stated, human nature and history is where I am looking at this from. People have a tendency to be unable to sit and do nothing for extended periods of time. I believe we are purpose driven but purpose is pretty loosely defined here.
Indulging the hypothetical (and arguably realistic in some circumstances) that AI replaces a tier of repeatable tasks I believe it would work from the bottom up. Tasks that are extremely repeatable would probably be gone 1:1 and it would be a sliding ratio as complexity increased where having human intervention as a backup becomes justifiable.
This would create a squeeze on the labor force which would bring up the very real and fair question of "How is it that I am unable to survive daily life when 100 - 200 years ago none of this automation / technology existed."
I think this could drive a sort of re-examining of what exists RE: a very inefficient and flawed system with a large amount of people possessing a lot of anxiety and time on their hands. It would be like the Eye of Sauron made up of those who were caught in the crossfire.
On the other side of the haves and have-nots I can imagine there being a very Harrison Bergeron style mindset of trying to popularize pacification until the next great innovation just solves itself.
On the extreme end, I just cannot imagine euthanasia, genocide, or population control schemes. It feels like we have come so far. How could it be possible we regress that far? I could imagine myself not wanting to live through any part of that. This seems like a very extreme and existential point to reach. I am trying to keep my thoughts pinned closer to biological and historical drivers.
I think we are hormone driven chemistry sets. I believe we respond to stimuli. I find it hard to believe anyone at any level could shut off that drive at such a massive scale and accurately predict the other side.
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> What do you think will happen if it isn't
Since such a thing has never happened, I doubt anyone, even scholars of history and anthropology, know.
Capitalism probably won't work in a world of ultra abundance though.
> I feel this is merely stating the obvious.
I think there is value in someone of Gates' stature stating the obvious, plainly.
If AI would become better at cognitive work than humans, I don't really see what new jobs would be created.
Construction for data centers?
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This is potentially much more upending since it would put hundreds of millions of people out of work and concentrate all wealth at literally a handful of individuals. We could lead this towards a beneficial scenario with proper taxation, but the individuals who stand to gain will do anything in their power to prevent this.
Industrial transitions pushed more people from leg-work to hand-work and then brain-work. What is left once AI is better at that?
> When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium.
This is asserted without evidence. There is absolutely no proof that AI requires humans in the loop to function or improve itself.
Compare it with Deepmind's go-playing program, AlphaGo, which mainly involved training a neural network on a large database of high-level human games. It defeated one of the top-ranked players in the world, Lee Sedol, but arguably it was drawing from human experience just like you described.
But it didn't stop there. After that, Deepmind developed AlphaGo Zero, a version that was trained exclusively through self-play, with no human feedback in the loop. That's what you would call "AI inputs coming from AI outputs" but it didn't have the result of “resulting in delirium”: instead, it became orders of magnitudes stronger than the original version (which it defeated in a 100 to 0 competition after 3 days of training).
This shows that AI can improve itself without having access to any human knowledge, and indeed transcend human performance by orders of magnitudes. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that general AI cannot improve itself the same way.
People who claim otherwise are engaging in wishful thinking; they just assert their conclusion, but have no rational arguments to back it up.
You have no evidence that self improvement can work at generalized tasks. Go is a simple game with a clear win condition, but deep strategy and near infinite permutations of how a game plays out. Winning a game of Go is a task well suited to machine learning.
One might say you are engaging in wishful thinking by believing it’ll just continue to work across all domains. The world is much bigger than a Go board.
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AlphaZero works in simple and fully observable environments like board games.
RLVR for LLMs works for coding and math domains which can be verified by code.
AlphaZero, RLVR and other RL methods don't work for learning dextrous manipulation for robotics, for example. Learning in robotics depends on human data.
Both programs had programmed in to their routines the rules of go (and for Alpha Zero the rules of chess and shogi). The programs then followed an optimization program. Absent the extremely specific "rules of this game" set by a human none of the programs work.
Amusingly, all three games are in the game theory sense trivial because they provably have a correct solution (probably a draw for chess), but the search space is so large that it is unlikely we will ever collectively invest the resources to discover the answer.
You are referring to gans which have complete understanding of the rules and an api interface to leverage interacting with the world.
While I think there could be an argument made here you are mixing apples and rocks if you believe ChatGPT is using gans.
I hate to be that person but you are showing that you are unable to differentiate between linear regressions, clustering, gradient descent, and generative adversarial networks. You are over your ski-tips and don't see itc
>>When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium.
>This is asserted without evidence. There is absolutely no proof that AI requires humans in the loop to function or improve itself.
Nope, it's actually fairly well established.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11269175/
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"... AI will avoid climate change."
xAI's Colossus 1 and 2 data center mobile gas turbines beg to differ.
AI data centers are driving electricity consumption in 100s of GW, and most of that energy is not clean renewable nor nuclear.
I believe we are on autopilot towards essentially free renewable electricity, and so this doesn't feel like a big concern when held against the potential end-of-humanity potential that AI has.
That doesn't seem like an actual quote in the original article, but this a fair point to bring up and a reminder that Gates has been problematic on his views on climate.
First, in the essay he mentions "Using AI, low-income farmers will soon be able to get better advice about all these things than even the richest farmers get today and increase their output substantially.". There may be some truth in this, but it's worth reminding that this is more of a 'productivist' worldview, and historically productivity gains in agricultural practices have benefitted farmers that were already wealthy (see books like The Globalization of Wheat by Marci Baranski [1] on the Green Revolution where "Borlaug’s new technologies ultimately privileged wealthier farmers, despite assurances to politicians that these new crops would thrive in diverse geographies and benefit all farmers").
Gates has also been criticized in the past for being influenced by figures like Bjorn Lomborg, where he had a (now-deleted) essay [2] with him, and there's a decent thread by energy entrepreneur Jigar Shah on Gates being off on climate issues for 15 years [3]
[1]: https://upittpress.org/books/9780822947349/
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230601175906/https://www.gates... (June 2023)
[3]: https://bsky.app/profile/jigarshahdc.bsky.social/post/3m4del...
The Green Revolution most certainly did improve the lives of tens of millions of low income farmers in India. The high yield crops also permanently removed the spectre of famine from India, saving tens of millions from starvation.
To retcon this into “only rich farmers benefited” is weird. Certainly there are many rich farmers out there. Of course their incomes increased when they could plant more productive crops. But so what if they make money? They’re feeding everyone!
Those emissions are nothing. Its a drop in the bucket compared with other industrial uses. A 50% reduction would change nothing, reduction to 0 would change nothing.
This is an absurd argument. Any one source is a drop in the bucket.
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The observer (Mr Gates) is inside the tech ecosystem, so his observations would be colored by the pace of things happening around him, in the tech space.
The world outside has much more friction and many other things going on. Tech had a wild run during his time because the American priorities at that time, favored it. There is no guarantee that tech would have same priority in a world that might get into more basic struggles.
If AI could affect jobs, that itself would work against it as it would cause basic struggles. Ultimately the world has to oscillate towards an equilibrium, acknowledging all forces from all corners. World is not a tech lab.
I believe he still has the power to change things at Microsoft, but he dares not to since it would angry shareholders who want this Musical Chairs game to continue.
> But the reliability problem is being fixed quickly, as researchers create models that can check their own work and improve themselves. Soon they will be substantially better than humans at many tasks.
Yes, no.
They don't. They just push probabilities higher. The tech is non-deterministic.
Humans are also non-deterministic, for all practical purposes, and the more of them you need to build some piece of software, the harder it can get to keep the likelihood of issues low.
I'm not saying it will happen, but at least it's not inconceivable that LLMs could surpass them in this calculation more and more often.
The quality of discussion here is not up to the standards I would want it to be.
What are you even saying there. "Humans are also not perfect, so anything is possible" but painted with a coat of fake intellectualism.
What a waste of time.
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> I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots.
You had me here.
If AI is really that powerful, shouldn't someone like Gates be able to end hunger and homelessness with a one-time capital expenditure? Somehow "give people jobs" is the primary problem he wants to solve, not ending poverty. It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.
>end hunger and homelessness with a one-time capital expenditure?
A significant percentage of the world's hungry live under warlords, militias and dictatorships that would simply kill anyone trying to peacefully give their subjects food.
Unless you're proposing AI military interventionism, you cannot fix this.
Homelessness on the other hand is mostly a mental health and drug addiction problem. Fixing it, in many cases, would require violating the consent/wishes of the homeless person.
The world's biggest problems, unfortunately, cannot be solved by throwing money at them. A lot of rich individuals, NGOs, and nation states have tried.
> Homelessness on the other hand is mostly a mental health and drug addiction problem
No it's not. It's not a coincidence that homelessness only skyrocketed at the same time housing price took off to the point even professionals are spending half of their salary on rent. And if you look at the statistics you'll see addiction is a widespread issue but homelessness is not — WV and NM has some of the worst overdose deaths and the least homelessness.
Please for god's sake let's address the elephant in the room for a second. It's the housing prices.
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I'm strictly talking about developed countries where we have rule of law and it's trivial to house and feed people if you have free housing and free food. I'm not suggesting AI can solve warlords, I'm not suggesting anyone should even try. But you don't need to solve drug addiction or mental health to solve homelessness if you can build apartments for $1/sq.ft. and provide food for pennies per day. You don't need to put people into make-work jobs to justify their existence.
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Look, either AI is going to magically solve all our problems or it isn't. If you're in the AI maximalist camp, then you better have an explanation for how AI is going to fix warlords or it's hard for me to take your singularity seriously.
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What if there are no more "jobs"?
What if he's right, and AI+Robots can do everything?
We still need to provide for all the humans. We will need to come up with a new system of distributing the world's resources that doesn't depend on "jobs" and allows the world's population access to the resources they need to live.
That's going to be very difficult, in the "we have to have a war about this" sense, traditionally.
> It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.
I wonder how the hell did you arrive at this conclusion from this text.
They probably didn't read it. The Parent comment suggests Bill is saying AI is wildly powerful, more precisely Parent comment is implying Bill has ulterior motives because AI isn't that powerful yet as he fear-mongers.
The actual text Bill wrote is more about highlighting upcoming problems and convincing governments to work together on potential harms coming soon.
He is planning to leverage AI with significant capital expenditures:
> The Gates Foundation has 19 years left of the 20 years in which it will spend its remaining $200 billion. AI will help it achieve its ambitious goals by both accelerating the discovery of vaccines and medicines for HIV, TB, malaria, and malnutrition and helping the healthcare workforce and patients know how to use those tools. The foundation’s goals include cutting the number of children who die every year in half again, as was done from 2000 to 2024. All of our work, not just health but also agriculture and education, will take full advantage of AI.
---
I think "maintaining the working poor" is a strange misread of "give people jobs". His point is that people get a ton of meaning out of their work in our current capitalist system, and regardless of whether or not we change our system in the long term, if we don't do something about jobs in the short term, there will be a civil crisis:
> In a capitalist society, employment is the way most people get the money they need to pay for the basics of life as well as being a key source of dignity and social connection.
> When a community has high unemployment, the ripple effects can be pervasive. Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses. Now imagine similar pressures on both white-collar and blue-collar workers nationwide.
> Waiting until people are already displaced or underemployed will be too late. AI is a structural challenge to the way our economy is organized, and it requires thinking and action now.
Ending poverty is a purely mechanical problem, with very straightforward solutions if you have robots that can do any mechanical task. You don't need to give anyone a job, you just need to give them food and shelter. (Ideally also medicine, but it sounds like that part at least he's thinking about, although again, perhaps not for anyone who doesn't already have it.)
Curing diseases and making people feel fulfilled are great goals, but they're not the primary ones in my mind. They are in Gates' mind because those are the biggest challenges he has personally experienced in his life.
Making the structural changes to our economy should be trivial if AI works as well as he's supposing it will. We won't need an economy at all, not to solve the problems caused by unemployment. (And that's the thing, is unemployment is not the actual problem, it is a cause of problems, but AGI would give us easy alternatives to the fundamentally unattainable goal of full employment.)
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I still think there is a contradiction he glossed over. In a capitalist society, jobs have a dual role that is sometimes paradox: For workers and employees, jobs are a source of income, skill, status and participation; for the (capitalist) state, a job is often a justification why the worker deserves to exist. But for the employer, jobs are a cost center and expenditure that should be minimized - that was why this tech was developed in the first place.
The state papers over that contradiction with the idea of perpetual economic growth, where the economic activity simply grows so fast that more jobs are created than are lost by efficiency improvements.
Gates is somehow expecting that "we" (whoever that is) agree just like that to keep certain jobs from being replaced by AI, even if they could. But that would go against all the forced and incentives that make up the dynamic of the current system.
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There are two purposes to jobs:
One is the obvious one, to produce things. AI can somewhat help with that, although less than you might think because it's largely producing knowledge output rather than physical things. If AI lets one knowledge worker do the work of 10, the effect of that is to free up 9 knowledge workers to take up manual labor, it's not to make manual laborers 10x more productive.
The second purpose is to distract people from attempting to work on their own interests and instead corral them into working for others'. You see examples of this in the form of acquihires (where they obviously don't need you to do the work, they already have a competing product, but they do need to take your product off the market), and in bullshit jobs, and in think tanks and consulting firms and legal machinery. It's a form of social control and a means to maintain social order, not a requirement for actual productivity. When you don't give people a job to do, they start working for their own interests, and their own interests frequently conflict with others. And we've seen that over and over again: the Great Depression nearly led to a fascist coup in the U.S. [1] and did result in fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain, and large communist movements in France and China. The COVID pandemic and subsequent lockdowns led to widespread protests and civil unrest in the U.S. and other countries.
Popular discourse concentrates almost exclusively on the first purpose, because the second one is icky to talk about. In reality most people are individually better off being independently wealthy and not working, but society can only absorb so many free agents with their own ideas and wills to power. (This is also why retirement and stay-at-home parenting are broadly institutionalized: it's okay for people to not work when they no longer have the energy to work, it's only dangerous when people are not working and yet have the energy to do things other than working). But the second reason actually has more explanatory power. If you assume that the true reason for employment is to take people out of the competitive will-to-power market, lots and lots of irrational moves suddenly make sense, like high-paid executives, bullshit jobs, bureaucratic incompetence, projects where billions are invested and then the whole thing is canceled, competing internal divisions, people not getting fired for doing nothing, etc. The whole point is for them to do nothing.
There's a Chesterton's Fence [2] issue at work here. Many people, particularly young people, grow up with the first explanation for work and take it at face value, and then a new technology comes around that saves all this work and they're like "Of course this is a good idea! I want to be part of it!" But if the actual purpose of work is to distract people from pursuing their own interests, this is incredibly dangerous. The actual consequence is going to be widespread unrest and quite possibly war.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
[2] https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
>It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.
This is the foundation of the economy. AN engine needs energy to keep going and workers are that energy. AI serves to automate a lot of that energy... but this leads to a side effect.
The side effect is that the economy is a self feedback loop, as workers not only run the engine but they also create the fuel that they themselves run on. If workers aren't working and AI has replaced them then what where are companies getting money from if workers can no longer buy things from the company? This is the fundamental loop of how an economy works... money gets paid to workers, workers spend the money and the loop continues and the economy self improves... If workers are replaced the economy no longer works.
You're addressing a flaw and an imperfection in the existing infrastructure (poverty),The article is talking about the very engine that maintains society itself which in theory can completely break if AI is introduced.
I don't know if it will ACTUALLY break, the circumstances surrounding all of this are very very complex that no one can fully predict the outcome but the theory behind it is legit and much more significant then a poverty issue.
Have you ever played a game where everything is free? Most people would call this "broken".
Gates is worth about $100B, Elon Musk about $850B. Let's call it $1T altogether. That would be at most about $115 per human on Earth (~8.5B humans). Not sure that is sufficient to "end hunger and homelessness."
Your calculation only makes sense if every one of those 8.5B humans is suffering from hunger and homelessness. Somewhere around 1 in 1000 people are homeless (https://worldmetrics.org/global-homelessness-statistics/), and 1 in 12 or so has experienced "hunger" some time in the past year (https://www.fao.org/hunger/en/). Obviously the numbers depend on how you define "homelessness" and "hunger", but in any case this multiplies the $ that could be used to help individuals by those factors. Between $1000 (hunger) and $115,000 (homelessness) may not sound like a lot, but when your yearly income is around $1000, it can mean a lot.
Those numbers are all funny money numbers. Neither could liquidate that and not fuck the rest of the world altogether.
let's set aside for a second the fact that this is not how things work, but you are off by an order of magnitude
EDIT: parent comment was edited: it used to say $15
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It’s not like giving that money to people is the only option. you can spend it in projects that produce food, build low cost houses, etc.
That not even enough for DoorDash in Seattle.
Does anyone else feel incredibly nostalgic for the time when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were the richest people on earth? I remember feeling pretty good about the fact that they were trying to do so much good, and about the giving pledge. Things feel so different now.
Few people were more vicious than Gates when he was running Microsoft. Maybe Larry Ellison but Gates was smarter and more cunning. I don't feel nostalgic about those days and Gates is just trying to buy his way into heaven and a positive view on his wikipedia page.
Classic example of Gate's avariciousness at the expense of others is:
https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html
> Gates is just trying to buy his way into heaven and a positive view on his wikipedia page.
That's gonna be really difficult as the heaven's manager probably have full access to the Epstein files.
Gates was a ruthless businessman who fought his way to a couple of monopolies and would have happily had a lot more if he could.
In a sense [1].
[1] https://youtu.be/HEMbp6Epfz8?is=D6YFfNuYQo3o0VTi
When that was a thing, I could never forgive Bill for Windows ME.
But, where would you like to go today?
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No because Bill Gates was hanging out with Jeffery Epstein that entire time. I also feel like people forgot his insanely evil business practices from the 80s and 90s? Bill Gates has always been one of the worst people out there. Every bit as bad as Musk. It's a big club, we're just not in it.
"He's dead, so..." [1]
[1] https://youtu.be/LNAwUxZ5nfw?is=OK_2b_dUdH8t1F2C
It’s not that big of a club actually only about 100,000 people max
Carlin is God but that quote doesn’t actually make a lot of sense
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Hahaha what a moron
was that before or after he caught STDs?
And what did they achieve?
It was mostly PR. Gates and Buffet were (and are) rich, but their money simply does not come close to the scale needed to fix the world's problems.
Gates is worth $110 billion. Global GDP is $126 trillion.
There was a lot of PR, but the money Gates and Buffet gave away, the foundations they created, the attention they drummed up for various charities and causes is certainly not to be scoffed at.
I'm sure they could have done more with less fanfare, but you seem to be setting the bar at "fixing the world's problems", which seems unfair. They have undoubtedly changed more lives than I'll ever manage to.
Love how Gates and Nadella had nothing to say until this year, after they clearly lost any hope of building a moat around it
You have to understand that Gates had other distractions to deal with
Yeah, underage Russian women.
That you had your hands over your ears doesn't mean they weren't talking.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451313
Never let a good crisis go to waste, billg.
If you’re one of the people wondering why there’s an enormous backlash to AI, here’s your answer: “this thing we’re building is going to he fucking terrible and ruin your life. Please give us all your money to build it.”
It’s exactly the same set of questions and challenges as with nuclear power
Nuclear power is one of the most amazing magical things on the planet but nuclear weapons present a massive challenge to social coordination. So maybe we should sit as a society and try to figure out how to manage that instead of just freak out and burn all of our own faces off because we can’t handle complex conversations.
Why is that so hard to grasp?
No? Nuclear never had those massive valuations. Did not hyped itself this ridiculous way. Was not forced down on everyone. And the vision of nuclear power was not "make humans obsolete".
We did not had nuclearmaxxing. We did not had doomtrolling from nuclear companies.
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> It’s exactly the same set of questions and challenges as with nuclear power
I'm not sure "provide cheap and plentiful power that may be risky if not managed correctly" is really on the same level as "replace all human labor we possibly can"
I agree with you that ideally we would coordinate and cooperate better, but the sad problem (the prisoner's dilemma, really) is that some (many? most? all?) people will not coordinate or cooperate no matter what, especially if they have an opportunity to get ahead by not cooperating. As long as people like that exist we have to find ways to work with them or work around them
It doesn't help that people with the most wealth seem like they mostly have that sort of personality
I immediately closed the page after I saw who wrote the article. Sory Bill, I pass.
I mean this respectfully:
I am no longer and will never again be interested in Bill Gates’ opinion about anything. He needs to retire. He’s a sclerotic representative of what needs to be left behind.
Thank you for your contributions, Bill. You’ve done enough.
ah, finally, we can hear what the massive pedophile has to say again
This is the person behind such products as Windows and Copilot. I honestly don't trust a single word he says.
But Bill stopped being involved in Microsoft’s day to day business over a decade ago. And he’s making valid arguments that don’t require us to trust him. Do you not think labor disruption, cyberattacks, and mass surveillance are big risks from powerful AI?
Dunno what's going on with these urls;
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49448137
Really you don’t know what HN is doing?
All of this is truly bizarre, I hope that we can make sense of this craze in the future.
Maybe it will be seen similarly to the dancing crazes of the Middle Ages.
I think it will be seen similar to the crypto craze to be honest. People on this very site, with an actual reputation, were telling us non stop how we were losers who were going to be left behind and stay poor. They never had to apologize for being obnoxious when that didn’t happen
Comparing AI to crypto makes zero sense. We get tremendous use from AI right now, while 2 decades after invention of crypto there are still basically zero legitimate use cases. I repeat - the utility of AI is not some hypothetical but something that happens right now at very large scale (so please don't reply with something in line "well, crypto was supposed to have lots of uses also").
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I spent about $200 on openai tokens today to solve a seriously hard distributed systems problem that would have taken me probably three weeks to understand, let alone fix.
Crypto only ever allowed me to buy drugs over the internet. I'm not really buying this argument.
Or maybe it's not just a craze and we'll soon look back and think "I wonder what we might've done differently if we'd been clear-eyed about what was happening."
Show me a person who truly revised their priors to put forward a novel solution to AI that isn't just "do the thing that I like and that benefits me in some way". The discourse around all this is a mix of quasi-religious beliefs (pro and con) and blatant opportunism. For Dario and Sam, the solution is "give us a monopoly on this tech". For Gates, it's "create an supranational organization with unprecedented taxation and regulatory powers" - world AI police, presumably staffed by technocrats like him.
What's your take? Do the ideas put forward by Gates strike you as worth pursuing? What are the trade-offs - how can they go wrong?
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Unless there's another significant breakthrough, LLMs will only get incremental improvements.
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You really think that legitimate concern about AI is equivalent to mass hysteria? Do you think AI will just stop getting better?
I could google this, but what are these dancing crazes?
Every person says this even in notes
dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49448137
I've tried to type this up a couple times, each time backing out because at the end of the day, I really don't give a rats fart about anything Gates has to say. I just wish he would disappear.
Ignoring Gates, what do you suggest as solutions to the problem at hand?
tax the rich else eat the rich
I mean, I'm as opensource as they come: not used windows since '98, despise microsoft and mostly everything he's done in business. But lets be fair, he moved the needle forwards, and after he retired he's done some fairly good shit around malaria and so on. I don't really begrudge him, if it wasn't him, it would have been some other wanker. We are where we are, better to just let go of the hate.
It's a fairly concise description of the challenges ahead, and hopefully some people read it and think a bit. He didn't have to write it, I'm glad he did.
billg: "kaczynski was right afterall"
640k ought be enough for this AI. I'm not sure takes like these are helpful. It's widely acknowledged that this is a technological shift, like electricity, like industrialization, etc. It could be (good or bad) but most likely (good AND bad). Does anyone really believe, sincerely, that AI will be the great equalizer? It's a hilarious proposition. They are working their hardest to make sure that its not imo.
No one seems safe from AI psychosis
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-glo...
Is it me or does it read like pure satire?
An AI ministry, “human-reserved” jobs, and taxes on AI tokens.
Sandbags against a tsunami. When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out?
What we need is deep thinking on the implications and make the default way forward one where we want to go. In other words, we build a channel for the flood waters, not a wall. Creating a role for "somebody to deal with AI issues" is one of those hand-wavvy upper management moves that looks defensible but simply passes the buck to someone who structurally lacks the agency to actual move the needle.
> When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out?
the only thing i can think of was when that Chinese scientist produced gene edited human babies. He was pretty much excommunicated from the scientific community and, eventually, spent some time in jail.
AI, on the other hand, has a huge profit potential and way too far out of the bag to go back in. To quote the movie Terminator, "it will never stop".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair
Yes. We can decide not to do bad things. Globally. Occasionally, it takes some time to figure out if something is bad. Especially when there's money to be made. But when we do, we can and have stopped doing them.
What surprises me even more is why Bill Gates writes this kind of bizarre, low-quality nonsense in the first place. What purpose does it serve? It’s so obviously shallow that it influences nothing and adds nothing to the conversation.
Locally, yes, like the Japanese shogunate blocking the outside world for more than two hundred years.
Globally, it is unrealistic.
You aren't alone surely
It reads like somebody got AI psychosis.
"A lot of people are skeptical of AI because it makes mistakes. But what's going to happen when it stops making mistakes??? It'll change the world!"
Honestly I suspect he's probably just cynically talking his book. All of this "AI is scary good / it'll be even scarier gooder soon" is no less advertising than slapping a cigarette logo on a racing car.
AI are improving their capacity at blazingly fast rate. Is noticing that AI psychosis? I'd say that believing that we are at the peak of LLM capabilities is some kind of psychosis due to large dose copium inhalation.
>The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history. 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.
It will be a force for good. But like all evolutionary steps the path to good will be paved with darkness.
The very existence of humanity and life itself rests on the foundation of natural selection. Humanity will be better, it will get better but before we get there... there will be a culling.
It's an unfortunate truth. We all might be culled.
Taxing AI tokens will only lead to the acceleration of local LLMs, to produce tax-free tokens.
We must tax lines of code. Like property tax, but for code. Every year, companies (and individuals) must declare all repos. Have them appraised.
"Taxing AI tokens will only lead to the acceleration of local LLMs"
This part was a good point, so I couldn't tell if the second part is satire or not.
Bill Gates, convicted monopolist and friend to Epstein, is always looking to burnish his legacy, but he’s too unimaginative. He needs to spend his fortune ending aging, not duplicating government efforts and trying to be a pundit.
epstein
I'm sorry. I absolutely do not trust Bill Gates. His history of ruthless, cutthroat tactics in the 90s is not easily forgotten and when he proposes things like international organizations to audit everyone's AI[1] I can't help but question his motives.
I also don't understand what gives him the moral standing to propose a solution at all. He's not the fucking pope but a ruthless tech businessman with vested financial interest in the technology involved. He should stick to his lane.
[1] > But even a country that gets its own house in order will still be exposed to risks that cross borders. This is why an international organization will need to be built in parallel.
> It will be unlike any other institution we have ever created, though it can follow the model of some existing systems. There’s an inspections regime for nuclear weapons, regulations for international aviation, and agreements that protect the ozone layer. A new global organization for AI will need elements of all three and more.
> He's not the fucking pope
No, but he did link to the Pope in this very essay.
Pope Leo XIV, "On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence":
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...
> ruthless tech businessman with vested financial interest in the technology involved
Isn't that past-tense? What's his financial interest these days? He still owns a small amount of MSFT, but he doesn't exactly have control over the corporation any more. I imagine Nadella always answers his calls, but I'd bet most CEOs will make time to take a call from Bill.
Interesting that you chose the pope as a positive control. I'd say that taken the whole history of papacy into question, there is no particular reason to trust the pope either.
One of the most unethical man in history, from software to family conduct is here to explain how AI can help humanity
All his good things (possibly help medicine! agriculture! government!) involve a belief in ever-increasing superintelligence and so much "hope" and optimimusm and may not ever exist.
All his negative things (increase of fraud, skill atrophy, cyberattacks, removing employment, consolidation of capital and wealth) exist currently now with AI as it is.
How long will negatives outweigh the positives? And will those positives ever actually come to fruition? How anyone (who is not a sociopath and expects to be one of those pyramid tops) can see a bright future is beyond my pessimism and sense of reality as it is now.
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We've banned this account for posting political flamebait almost exclusively. This is not what HN is for and destroys what it is for.
We should not be listening to a man who drugged his wife with Epstein supplied antibiotics after getting an STD (among many, many other bad things he's done).
https://www.btimesonline.com/articles/176578/20260201/epstei...
Moral absolutism to apply a 1-bit value judgment to a human being is a pretty sad way to have a worldview, friend.
Looking at the exceedingly long history of someone's immoral actions and deeds isn't a "1-bit value judgement". The guy literally teamed up with a pedophile pimp foreign spy to drug his wife. I'll pass on hearing his thoughts about literally anything.
I mean, drugging someone is a pretty big deal. We aren't talking about shoplifting or something.
It's up to us, the public, to defend our society from deteriorating. There's no reason to defend Epstein's billionaire friends, you have nothing to gain from that.
Yes, let's put copilot in every app on Windows, Azure & Office :-)
Bill Gates hasn't been at Microsoft for a long time now.
He is on the board.
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"Agriculture is where I see the fastest impact of AI in low-income countries."
As we've seen with Haber-Bosch (synthetic fertilizer) it will just allow the population to expand until we're up against the resource limit ceiling.
I don’t think so. I think we’re past the point of rapidly increasing population in most of the world at this point (aside from sub sharan Africa which will change soon as well). I don’t think the current low birth rate has anything to do with a resource cap.
"In my second one, which I started full time in 2008, I am giving back the wealth I made at Microsoft with the goal of making the world a healthier, better educated, and more equitable place."
Like inventing waterless toilets when people just need access to clean water ?
The sad story is that we don't need innovation, we need better politics.
Oh and he could open source windows, that would make us more equitable for sure.