Bill Gates warns young people of four major global threats, including AI | But try not to worry, kids

From the article: Bill Gates has an ominous warning for young people: there are four or five “very scary” things that they should be afraid of. In addition to the persistent fear of nuclear war, the Microsoft founder says unchecked AI is also a threat.

In an interview with Patrick Collinson, Gates said the only thing he really worried about a lot when he was younger was nuclear war.

While that particular concern hasn’t disappeared, Gates says younger generations now have extra threats to society that they must live with: climate change, bioterrorism or another pandemic, and maintaining control of advanced AI.

There have been plenty of previous warnings about AI advancing too quickly, reaching a point where it becomes smarter than humans and decides the world would be better off without us in it.

A survey in 2023 found that two-thirds of Americans believed AI could threaten civilization, and Professor Geoffrey Hinton, one of the godfathers of AI, believes there could be an AI that presents an extinction-level event in five to twenty years. Hinton left Google in 2023 due to concerns that AI was advancing faster than expected and could become uncontrollable.

Gates isn’t anti-AI, though. He believes that the technology could be used for good, such as filling skill gaps.

When will we stop listening to people we’re forced to listen to? Taking life advice from Bill gates is like taking guitar lessons from a goddamn tractor.

Can we just ban this overdone AI fear mongering? It’s just marketing hype and the products are struggling to drive actual return on investments. They’re also plateauing and they’re still just glorified auto corrects. They have no way of verifying information which makes them completely unviable in tons of fields since hallucinations are such a fundamental deal breaking issue. 

Stop listening to the snake oil salesmen on what it “could” be, but rather look at the actual progress and current applications. When you actually look into companies attempting to live up to their overblown hype, you’ll realize none of them have actually been able to follow up their claims.

Humans have made a strong case for why a smarter species would come to that conclusion.

“filling skill gaps” – Short term? Sure and it’s great!

Long term this will not matter.

id be a lot less scared of AI if it wasnt being used to automate all the cognitive labour before the physical labour with probably that teensy tiny negligible exception of yknow military production and automated weapon systems lmfaooo

it would be kinda hilarious how obvious the trajectory is if it were not so terrifying

My threat list:

1) Billionaire oligarchs
2) Social Media brainwashing
3) Right-Wing extremism
4) Wars

And as many wars are started by right-wing extremists, that came into power by mass manipulation in social media that are in the hands of billionaire oligarchs, I would say the first and foremost global threat and source of all these evils are BILLIONAIRE OLIGARCHS.

The only thing AI is a threat to is our positively mediaeval notion that the average person needs a job in order to deserve income.

UBI is entirely possible. Distributing labor-free money to consumers would allow all of us to receive more goods and services while working less. The logical result of new technologies like AI being invented is that the UBI should increase, allowing the employment level to go down. Robots and AI *should* be enabling prosperous unemployment already, but they simply can’t because our UBI is missing.

Any amount of UBI we can sustain higher than $0 without inflation is equivalent with a boost in real income and market performance. That is a mathematical fact. There’s no economics-based argument against UBI; it improves consumer outcomes almost by definition.

The only thing standing in the way of greater income and greater leisure time for the average person is our culture’s backwards attitudes about jobs, labor and technology. We envision the economy as a giant workplace to fill up with billions of jobs; we aren’t even *trying* to use our technology to save labor and discover a more optimal labor/leisure balance.

The idea that AI should be feared because it might “steal our jobs” is evidence of just how confused our society is about what a job even is. A job isn’t a benefit, it’s a cost to our time and personal freedom which we are compensated for in the form of a wage.

Jobs are useful, but it *never* made sense to maximize the occurrence of jobs or to restrict income to the tune of wages. This is tantamount to wasting people’s time and keeping people needlessly poor.

We need an ample and properly calibrated UBI, to allow people all the leisure time that the modern market economies actually make possible. We should have implemented UBI around the start of the Industrial Revolution; by now it is long overdue.

AI is somewhere down in the list at 10+ issues.

But billionaires keep using it as a distraction.

And unlike all the other issues, it also comes with massive benefits at the same time.