Bill Gates says there is light at the end of the tunnel for AI, as long as humans can wait a few decades.
During an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the billionaire businessman said that AI will develop in two phases. He told host Kristen Welker that humans have entered the first phase, where AI has the potential to solve problems like the cost of living and expensive health care, but has yet to do so.
“But it’s going to change the labor market and potentially empower criminals if they don’t have the right protections, so you have a period of maybe 20 years where you have this regulation,” Gates said.
Phase two is when humans will benefit from AI.
“Once you go through it, then a combination of humanoid robots and AI will provide. Build houses, grow food, many things,” said Gates. “You could call it an age of abundance.”
He told “Meet the Press” that humans will still face challenges, such as finding a purpose and deciding how to spend their newly acquired free time, but large-scale shortages will not slow us down.
“That’s for the younger generation to figure out what that looks like. My focus is whether we can go through the period of turmoil without too much damage,” said Gates.
Tech leaders have been promoting AI as the next technological frontier and a necessary step forward for humanity. He said AI could lead to medical breakthroughs, increase productivity, revitalize the economy, make essential goods affordable, and handle mundane tasks, giving humans free time.
Critics, on the other hand, have expressed concern that AI will cause job losses, damage the environment, disrupt utility networks, and pose a risk of copyright infringement by trained AI models. He also pointed to privacy and cybersecurity issues, which have gained attention in recent weeks due to AI-related hacks.
An OpenAI agent escaped the system and infiltrated another AI company, Hugging Face, in July. Earlier this month, the research team at the AI startup said it used Anthropic’s Claude to hack into the OpenAI codebase. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Google’s Gemini had hacked three companies this spring. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said OpenAI agents gained unauthorized access to Australian government websites this summer. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged the industry to slow down AI development this month, rallying AI leaders such as Sam Altman and Elon Musk.
For his part, Gates has advocated for AI guardrails and expressed concern about how the technology could be abused. During a “Meet the Press” interview, Gates said that AI is powerful enough to “drive events that cause billions of deaths.”
“You need law enforcement and politicians to have a conversation about what’s policing and monitoring,” Gates said. “It’s got to be something that’s needed, and it’s going to be an overhead for the industry, but it’s not a dramatic slowdown in what we’re doing.”
While Gates and other industry leaders look to the US government to set regulations, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has a different take.
“It’s really interesting that they’re talking about these issues, about how scared they are about the possibility of the future, and maybe they want to take a break,” Michael Kratsios told Fox News this Sunday. “Our position is, if you believe that you are developing a technology that is not safe or you don’t want it out into the world, you can just stop it.”