The choices we make about AI now are critical | Bill Gates
Through my day job, I have access to the latest models. They keep getting better. They are really much better than 18 months ago. I predicted that data optimization and improvement might allow this.
Now we don’t know how far we can get, but it’s getting scary/exciting. And exhausting.
We need a new society model. Right now.
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.
That is all over. In a capitalist society, companies use the best tools to produce what they need to produce. People truly compete against a 24/7 slave that will never get sick or pregnant, and who’s also getting better all the time. There’s no competition here. We’re getting decimated.
This would be the worst possible time for humans to lose their critical thinking skills. In an era of deepfakes and misinformation that can be tailored to you individually, the ability to tell what is true from what is not becomes an essential life skill.
Oh, that essential life skill is fighting for its life. Social media has already spent 15 years making people’s critical thinking skills an ersatz of what it was. Almost no one born with the internet and smartphones has the capacity to think critically. They’re all parrots. The hivemind has taken over. It is horrible. I suspect AI companies are kind of cool with that (future $$$).
This issue cannot be resolved without a new society model.
As people who spend their lives thinking about what it means to be human, religious leaders can play a key role in this.
Absolutely fucking not. Being human is being what we are now, doing what we do. Religion is the least interesting or important thing in today’s world. We preserve our humanity by keeping it simple. Respectful. And democratic. There’s no need for religion, which only brings conflict, in there.
The highest priority is a monumental task: creating a domestic and international framework for dealing with AI.
The task isn’t about AI, which is AI-ing well. The task is international UBI. The task is new society model, due to unprecedented automation push through AI. AI is like a wild horse that we cannot really tam at the scale of the planet. Capitalism has always been a wild beast, and that’s how it functions best: by being free to do as it pleased. That’s how we got those incredible gains on so many fronts, for decades: capitalism and innovation. We cannot contain them. We need to protect people (UBI now), and let the wild horse run.
Something in the care they gave my dad was irreplaceably human. No robot could or should have done it.
That’s understandable, but that’s romantic. My foster mom has Alzheimer’s as well and a robot taking care of her 24/7 in her own house would have been much better than being patient #526 in a retirement home with humans who can be good but also not good at all because it’s a job to pay bills, first and foremost. With a robot I would get automatic daily reports on her health, the robot would have never let her fall like 10 times in two years, I would talk to her every single day and she wouldn’t be as affected by the decease because she would still be in her home of 50 years instead of a place she doesn’t know, full of people she doesn’t know either.
I believe that as AI and robots improve, we’ll set aside certain things for only people to do. I’ve started calling this domain Human Reserved, and it’s an example of the kinds of ideas we’ll need to consider.
Capitalism doesn’t work that way, Bill. The second a machine can do well something a person does, everyone in the world switches to the machine. Ask the sex toy industry. This is the past 100 years. Again: we cannot compete against a 24/7 slave. My dad keeps adding features to his custom software and needs less people than ever to output more. The dynamic cannot be changed by creating exceptions. That will only enable conflict and unfairness.
As workers are pushed into different jobs, they will need retraining and other support from the social safety net. But they will be working less, which means they will be paying less in income taxes, and government revenues will drop just when the demand for those services is greatest. The funds will have to come from somewhere at a time when budgets are stretched.
This is bullshit. Governments literally create money! When a company says “I need $100M right now” and asks a bank for a loan, the bank doesn’t have the money either and asks the government “I need $100M worth of bonds right now” and the government creates that shit, out of thin air. Boom, here’s a $100M, please pay me back in the next 60 years. That’s how money is created. Checks and balances are an afterthought. The US, France and Japan combined debt today is 53 trillion dollars. 53,000 billion dollars. No brain can parse that number. Who will pay? No one knows. Shouldn’t those countries face enormous sacrifices already? That’s not what it looks like. It’s hot, but no one is burning. Economic debt is pure BS.
My point is, the classical economic view that Bill grew up on, that Boomers believe in, does not exist anymore. Taxes to raise money is some 1900s paradigm that hasn’t worked in a while. Today and moving forward, just give money to people directly so that they stop scheming and doing stupid shit to make money, like starting idiotic businesses or betting on phones. That’s what needs to happen. And people scream “that’s communism!” if you share money created by massively automated systems and I’m all like “how tf you care so much about naming something? Irrelevant ass shit”. Make something work, and let it be. If people choose to use that income to drink to their deaths instead of investing in themselves and in good times for a long time, let it be. If that allows tons of people to heal, let it be because that is progress.
While I was typing this, a new GPT came out. And it is apparently, again, a massive improvement?
UBI now y’all. It is obvious.