Bill Gates warns that artificial intelligence is more dangerous than big tech is letting on
Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, has been vocal in his warning that artificial intelligence poses a serious threat to jobs and lives, and that addressing the risks urgently should be “the world’s top priority”.
In an hour-long interview with The New York Times last week, Mr. Gates said the tech industry is deliberately downplaying these threats because there is too much money at stake.
“Privately, people who understand how good it is and how it’s getting better are very concerned,” he said. But few tech executives, Mr. Gates said, are willing to admit this publicly. “Now they’re like, ‘Hey, man, don’t say that. It’s bad for us — another trillion dollars we’re trying to raise.’
On Wednesday, Mr. Gates published a nearly 6,000-word essay about himself personal website he described his concerns about artificial intelligence and offered solutions such as new taxes and bans. He said he was motivated to speak out now because recent improvements in AI have far exceeded his expectations and because the industry has ignored technological milestones — like AI escaping the control of its creators or creating recipes for bioweapons — that were once said to require more caution.
“They’re just full speed ahead and hoping the good outweighs the bad,” he said.
Mr. Gates, 70, is the latest in a string of tech figures to highlight the risks of artificial intelligence as the industry spends trillions of dollars on new data centers and as young AI companies approach one of the biggest initial public offerings in history.
He takes his stance as he emerges from a long period of scandal. Earlier this year, the release of the emails of sex predator Jeffrey Epstein brought renewed attention to Mr Gates’ interactions with him.
Mr. Gates had to withdraw from an AI conference in February and testified for six hours before a House committee in June. The revelation of his infidelity, combined with his divorce in 2021, also severely damaged his reputation. He acknowledged that these were all “mistakes” of his own making.
He seems more willing to step back into the spotlight after an answer every question from the parliamentary control committee. “I think people understand what I did, what I didn’t do and that I learn when I make mistakes,” he said in an interview.
Mr. Gates admitted that he could also be the wrong messenger simply because of his vast wealth and history as an aggressive Microsoft CEO. In a landmark federal case in 2000, Microsoft was found to have repeatedly abused its monopoly during its surveillance. (Mr. Gates left the company’s board in 2020.)
While Mr. Gates avoided criticizing Microsoft or other companies by name, he argued that he was uniquely positioned to work on the problem of artificial intelligence. He is a technologist and industry insider no longer driven by the profit incentives of corporate governance, and has spent decades addressing inequality through his philanthropic foundation.
“The irony of ‘the innovation lover is afraid and says we’re not ready and we’re crossing thresholds’ is perhaps even more poignant,” he said.
Mr. Gates said that technological advances really amazed him three times: In 1980, when he first saw the graphical user interface that led to the modern personal computer. In 2022, when OpenAI executives came to his house to show off what would soon become ChatGPT. And this year, when he took a close look at the advances made by Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI tool.
Mr Gates said coding was the subject he knew best and Claude’s skills shocked him. “The idea that these things are better than me in a sense now, it’s like, What the hell?” he said.
Technological breakthroughs in the past have created more jobs than they have eliminated, Mr. Gates said. But he doesn’t believe it could happen this time either.
The AI era is “completely, absolutely, completely, completely different,” he said. He admitted that this unpopular opinion (in tech circles) was “a hell of a claim, and I’m betting everything I know—everything—that you’re kidding?”
He said mass job losses, if not addressed, were inevitable as AI would spread across the economy, leaving little room for one industry to absorb refugees from another. The world’s biggest technology companies, including Microsoft, are racing to help business customers implement AI that could replace many workers.
Mr. Gates said that companies are merely responding to market incentives, but that those incentives may be at odds with what is best for the company.
He proposed a new tax on the use of artificial intelligence, known as a “token tax”, to make it more expensive to replace humans and provide money to help those who lose their jobs. A token is the basic unit of AI computing. The idea of taxing it gained some traction, even on Wall Street, as a way to raise the cost of using machines instead of human labor.
According to Mr Gates, some jobs should be banned from being replaced by artificial intelligence – an idea he called “Human Reserved” – because the role is deeply personal, such as a carer, or people in those positions are unlikely to find new employment.
He pushed for new international agreements that would set clear criteria for monitoring and limiting extreme risks such as bioterrorism. He said it might take just a few people with access to advanced AI to develop new pathogens.
He said he would be happy to debate anyone who would argue against mandatory reviews of any artificial intelligence system that could be weaponized to produce new molecules and unleash a pandemic. Mr. Gates added that he was impressed with the voluntary measures the White House and industry leaders were developing.
“Self-regulation on the most dangerous tool ever invented?” he said incredulously. “No thank you!”
Mr Gates said he was in a “state of shock” as to why he was not more pressing on the issues. Many of his concerns echo those raised by Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei, but Dr. Amodeia put him at odds with the Pentagon, the White House and much of the tech industry.