Ezra Klein, Bill Gates’s Blunt Warning on A.I. NYTimes, Sept. 29.16.
From Klein's intro:
Very few people combine technological experience, corporate experience and governmental experience in quite the way he does.
So his recent essay on A.I., in which he says that he is staking his reputation on trying to get people to see how bad what is coming might be and trying to get them to see that we are not ready for what is about to happen, was something.
It was a real departure from what I’ve read from Gates previously.
When I sat and talked to him, I was really struck by how emphatic he was — how afraid even he seemed to be of what we are building, and how so many of the people in positions of authority are denying what is about to happen.
It’s really quite a call to arms.
Here's a passage from the second half of the interview:
KLEIN: But I guess this gets to the broad engagement question.
I don’t have a good crystal ball on this. I find the range of outcomes terrifyingly wide. This range, it seems to run from massive material abundance and elimination of want to, actually, it doesn’t change all that much, to human extinction — it’s a pretty wide range of outcomes to consider.
What I hear you saying to me — and you should tell me if I’m getting part of your position wrong here — what I hear you saying to me, convincingly and forcefully, is that the A.I. jobpocalypse is a very real thing. That mass displacement of workers with no real answer to that is a very real thing.
When you talk about broad societal engagement, I think most Americans — most people in most places, if they heard that and they were convinced of it — and polls show most people think A.I. is going to take jobs and not create them. But they would say: Actually, just stop. If what you are going to do is make it unclear how I or my family or my children or my friends will have a job, say, in America — please just don’t. Let’s just stop for now.
You actually seem, to me, to have a stronger negative perspective on the jobs question than a lot of the people I talk to, even in the labs, and definitely a lot of the economists I talk to.
You’re shaking your head at me — I do talk to people. I’m not coming from nowhere on this.
So for whom, then, is A.I. a good trade if you believe the job effect is going to be so ruinous for most people?
GATES: That’s funny — when I was telling this to a person who some people consider the lead economist looking at A.I., he said: How can the crowdsourcing website Mechanical Turk still exist? How can Amazon run that if A.I. is as good as you said? And I said: It won’t.
A week later, Amazon announced it would completely shut down.
You have to say, isn’t it pretty stunning that the more you know, the more concerned you are?
Take Anthropic C.E.O. Dario Amodei. Dario has spoken out about job impacts. Now he’s a bit more guarded.
Hinton, I agree, went too far, and he said: OK, it’s coming tomorrow that there’ll be fewer radiologists. And of course, there are more today.
So we have some of that taking place, and we have the analogies with the past where people are saying: Well, this is like the PC, not like evolutionary history.
This is like evolutionary history. This is like, the aliens really are here and have come. They didn’t have to do spacecraft; they were created in laboratories. But that’s the kind of thing we’re dealing with.
And if we retain control, then eventually you do get — not to overuse the word that you’ve used — you do get to this superabundance period. And there you have deep, almost philosophical, religious issues of: If we don’t have the shortages that we’ve organized society around, why should you learn? And how do you find purpose?
Then you have deep philosophical and religious problems, but you do not have deaths from malaria or food shortages or problems accessing a doctor. And so if we get to that, a younger generation will figure out: OK, how do we live? How do we spend time? That’s a very different world than what we have today.
I think what this generation has to do is make sure we get through that with humanity still in control, and with the disruption — the number of bioterror events, or the number of people whose lives are damaged by job loss — we need to minimize that over what’s probably a 20-year-plus transition period.
There's much more in the interview.
