Bill Gates, a co-founder of Microsoft, stated on Sunday that automation powered by AI will be beneficial overall and free up humans to focus on more important projects, but he also cautioned that the change was occurring too quickly.
“When you improve productivity, it shouldn’t mean that if you get less productive, that’s bad. And if you get more productive, that’s good. It means you can free up these people to have smaller class size or have longer vacations or to help do more. The question is, if it comes so fast that you don’t have time to adjust to it,” the billionaire philanthropist said in an interview.
Gates’ comments coincide with rising worries that a significant portion of the white-collar job may be displaced by the quick deployment of AI capabilities. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has already issued a warning that the adoption of AI will cause almost 50% of entry-level, white-collar occupations to leave by 2030.
Even blue-collar employment might not be safe. “In parallel, when the robotic arms start to be decent, which they’re not today, will start to affect even larger classes of labour,” Gates said.
The interview also follows a significant announcement by President Donald Trump, whose White House administration unveiled its Silicon Valley-friendly plan to make the US a global leader in artificial intelligence. With the exception of requiring tech companies to remove political bias in AI, the plan primarily involves rolling back regulations to encourage innovation.
On the difference between AI and artificial general intelligence (AGI), he said, “people use very different definitions”. According to Gates, AGI will be achieved when AI tools can do “a telesales job or support job” in a way that is “cheaper and more accurate than humans are.”
He added that the rate at which AI was improving surprises him, especially with new features such as Deep Research capabilities. “I have an advantage that I have very smart people I can call up when I get confused about physics. But now I actually use deep research. And then I’ll send that answer to my smart friends and say, ‘Hey, did it get it right?’ And most of the time they’re like, ‘oh yeah, you didn’t need me’,” Gates said.
Gates also said he is working with Microsoft and OpenAI to “make sure” that AI tools are released in low-income countries “to help with their health and education and agriculture.”
When asked about what advice he had for youngsters trying to navigate the challenging job environment in the AI era, Gates said, “The ability to use these tools is both fun and empowering. Embracing AI and tracking it will be very important. That doesn’t guarantee that we’re not going to have a lot of dislocation.”
“But I really haven’t changed my ‘be curious, read and use the latest tools’ recommendation for young people,” he added.
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