Bill Gates warned about the risks of AI in the coming years

In an interview on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Bill Gates called artificial intelligence “the biggest productivity improvement of our lifetime,” but argued that regulations still need to be created globally to prevent it from “falling into the hands of malicious actors.” Over the past week, the International Monetary Fund noted that “around 40% of jobs could be affected by AI development.” Far from agreeing with this statistic, the tycoon, co-creator of Microsoft, assimilated the advance in technology with the growth of agricultural production in the last century. Just as with agricultural productivity in 1900, people were saying, ‘What are people going to do?’ In fact, a lot of new things were created, a lot of new job categories and we’re much better off than when everyone else was working in the field,” he said. In that sense, the founder of Microsoft argued that AI could solve problems for doctors such as paperwork, and indicated that “some of the work that they don’t like, we can do it very efficiently.” However, the advantages brought about by the development of Artificial Intelligence need to be accompanied by important regulations in order to avoid the generation of problems such as the increase in cyberattacks or the design of weapons. In dialogue with Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI – the company that created Chat GPT – Gates stressed that it is “essential to include politicians in this discussion”, and proposed the creation of a global government to face the potential dangers of AI. Altman also referred to the advances that could exist in the near future in relation to emerging technology. “People want very different things from GPT: different styles, different sets of assumptions. We will also give you the ability to use your own information. The ability to know about yourself, your email, your calendar, the way you want me to schedule your meetings, to be able to connect it with external services. Those will be many of the most important areas for improvement,” he said. This needs global regulation of some kind because of the potential impact. There will be a lot of short-term questions like what these models will be allowed to say and not say or how we think about copyright. Countries will think about it in a different way and that’s fine,” Altman added.

Original source in Spanish