Comment by jswelker
1 day ago
Where does Gates talk about existential risk? All I read and heard was about increasing inequality, harming education and child development, creating economic and political discord, empowering evil people. No terminators in sight.
"Bill Gates: A.I. ‘Makes Nuclear Weapons Look Like Nothing’ | The Ezra Klein Show"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_156w0aYtU
Yes that is one dumb quote, but I listened to the whole podcast, and it is nothing like that. And in some sense it is true because nuclear weapons have been successfully contained to rational acting governments, whereas AI cannot possibly. Nukes are extremely high blast radius (pun intended) but low diffusion. AI is the opposite.
The worst part of the interview was a long cringe inducing tangent about Jeff Epstein. Everything else was pretty grounded.
> Yes that is one dumb quote, but I listened to the whole podcast, and it is nothing like that.
Really? Here's a longer Bill Gates quote (from https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas... ):
Ezra Klein: "So why is anything needed beyond — and is anything needed beyond? — the simply natural incentives under capitalism and normal corporate reputational management?"
Bill Gates: "Well, I almost can’t believe you’re asking that. This is the most dangerous thing that humans have ever gone near. [...] You can take an open-source model that can create bioweapons and disable any monitoring of any kind, and this exists today. So no, there is no filtering of any kind. And so say you kill 100 million people — you want to use a lawsuit? I almost can’t keep a straight face."
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