Bill Gates says artificial intelligence could bring significant changes to jobs and shift the balance of power across industries and society.
In an interview on The Verge’s Decoder podcast, Gates highlighted how AI shifts abilities for cyber and bio harms from nation-states to independent profit-seekers mandating the deployment of open-weight models exclusively through state-sanctioned infrastructure.
He predicted humanoid robots arriving in two to eight years to handle jobs like construction and surgery, making most human labor unnecessary soon and leading in an era of radical abundance 20 years before reaching true abundance.
The 70-year-old stated, “My big concern is this 20-year transition period, where they’ll have winners and losers and a lot of disruption.”
Gates also noted COVID did not unfold as expected and anticipated massive cyberattacks ahead amid a separate Dutch court case over vaccines. He also warned that even in the best possible scenario, AI’s development could bring one of the most tumultuous periods in human history.
“I hate being the bearer of news concerning this, but it’s even worse not to tell people that this is coming. We have choices as humans to make about how we shape it, he continued.”
