In terms of equity, AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice. The challenge is monumental. Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history.”
— Bill Gates
When I was a literature and creative writing major at Dartmouth College in the early 1970s, the campus had become one of the early places where computers were integrated into every facet of student life. Peter D. Kiewit ’22, had donated money to build the Keiwit Computation Center at the corner of North Main and Elm streets in Hanover, a building dedicated on December 2, 1966. When I arrived on campus, Dartmouth President John Kemeny, co-developer of the BASIC computer language, saw to it that every student would gain computer experience.
I still remember my student ID generated by the $2.5 million General Electric 625 computer: 126022. The computer also randomly selected me to serve on a student panel to tackle the question of whether Dartmouth — an all-male college when I enrolled — should become co-educational. (I voted for the change and saw it implemented the following year.)
For my computer class, I chose to create a program that would generate poetry. As I would learn of my own poetic skills, the results were not impressive. I found it much more interesting to use the computer to play an early video game that involved shooting asteroids from a starship. My boss/colleague at The Bristol Enterprise, Victor Field, and I spent one entire night playing the game until dawn when he visited me at the college. (I had worked at The Enterprise after school and during vacations during high school and college.)
Others would take the computer more seriously. Bill Gates, a student at Harvard, was impressed by the possibilities: “Invented by two Dartmouth College professors in 1964, BASIC was designed to be easy to learn for people with no computer experience,” he wrote. “With little study or technical aptitude, a person can write their own software in BASIC — anything from a checkbook-balancing program to a tic-tac-toe game. … Computer languages like BASIC serve the same purpose as English or any other language. In the same way that you can use English to order a coffee at a café, you can use BASIC to tell a computer to run a program, solve a math problem, or perform some other task.
“There is a catch, though: Computers don’t speak BASIC. And the language they do speak is so complex and unintuitive that programming in it is incredibly difficult. To bridge the gap, Paul and I set out to create a BASIC interpreter, which would translate code line by line as the program runs.”
That effort led to the creation of Micro-Soft, which later dropped the hyphen and now is at the forefront of personal computing and artificial intelligence. Gates himself left the company to form the philanthropic Gates Foundation, and today he writes, “I’m excited about the impact that AI will have on issues that the Gates Foundation works on…. The world needs to make sure that everyone — and not just people who are well-off — benefits from artificial intelligence. Governments and philanthropy will need to play a major role in ensuring that it reduces inequity and doesn’t contribute to it.”
However, he warns, “Any new technology that’s so disruptive is bound to make people uneasy, and that’s certainly true with artificial intelligence. I understand why — it raises hard questions about the workforce, the legal system, privacy, bias, and more. AIs also make factual mistakes and experience hallucinations.
Gates acknowledges that current AI models — like my efforts at getting a computer to write poetry — cannot understand the human context behind a request. “When you ask an AI to make up something fictional, it can do that well. But when you ask for advice about a trip you want to take, it may suggest hotels that don’t exist. This is because the AI doesn’t understand the context for your request well enough to know whether it should invent fake hotels or only tell you about real ones that have rooms available….
“Then there’s the possibility that AIs will run out of control. Could a machine decide that humans are a threat, conclude that its interests are different from ours, or simply stop caring about us?” He argues, “To make the most of this remarkable new technology, we’ll need to both guard against the risks and spread the benefits to as many people as possible.”
In an essay Gates published five days ago that has gained a lot of attention, he writes, “[T]he reliability problem is being fixed quickly, as researchers create models that can check their own work and improve themselves. Soon they will be substantially better than humans at many tasks.” However, “We have no experience with a technology that can be adopted quickly or that can think and move like a human. When the PC came along, it took twenty years to significantly change how we worked because the software had to be developed, the price had to come down, and people had to learn how to use the tools and incorporate them into their business processes. AI, on the other hand, runs on the devices we already have, and it uses natural language. We don’t have to adapt to it because it can adapt to us. It can watch the same training video that is used to train human workers and learn from existing data.”
Anticipating criticism of his recommendations to address the challenges, he writes, “I want to acknowledge a potential bias. I have benefited enormously from the technology industry. Although I have diversified my portfolio quite a bit, I still have financial ties to it. I am working with Microsoft and other AI companies in my role as chairman of the Gates Foundation to try and ensure AI is deployed in ways that will truly benefit people around the world.
“However, my views on AI are not motivated by the potential to make money for myself. Any profits generated by my investments, including those related to technology, will go to the Gates Foundation to tackle global inequity. Of course, readers will have to decide for themselves whether this clouds my view.”
That said, he goes on point out the challenges ahead.
“Many observers say that this technology transition will be like previous ones. They give the example of how jobs in the United States shifted from agriculture to office work. However, that proceeded over several generations and created new jobs where human cognition was required. In this case, the technology can substitute for human cognition…. AI will take on work in law, customer service, medicine, software, and manufacturing. It will hit these industries rapidly, over the course of a decade rather than a few generations. There will be some new jobs, but without the right policies there will be far fewer than exist today.”
One of the dangers, he says, is that most of the new jobs being created will require skills that take many years to learn. “Robots and AI combined can create a vicious cycle. After one company adopts them and uses the savings to lower its prices, its competitors will feel immense pressure to do the same. If existing companies don’t adopt them, then start-ups will. Many people will shift to other jobs, but the turmoil of losing work, getting retrained, and finding other work will be significant. Market forces will make adoption go faster and faster and, unless we intervene, there will be fewer good jobs available and the benefits will accrue to a small group. … The biggest shift for workers will happen when AI provides nearly error-free work. At that point, it will be able to function on its own without a human checking in on it, and companies will have every economic incentive to let it.”
Another danger is one that Gerry Kennedy of Alton has been warning about for years: “Long before AI entered the mainstream,” Gates writes, “there was information online about how to create weapons like bombs, bioweapons, even computer viruses. AI will make it much easier to not only get this information but act on it. Even criminals with very limited skills will be able to target victims at every scale: individuals, companies, and governments.
“AI capabilities are starting to be used for cyberattacks. The smartest cybersecurity experts I know are scared about the next few years, because the attackers are getting powerful new capabilities faster than the defenders can fix all the weaknesses. After all, the same AI model that can find a flaw in software so a company can fix it can also help a criminal exploit it. The resources needed to make an attack are going down significantly and we haven’t been able to separate those abilities from benign usage.
“Think about the infrastructure that will be vulnerable: hospitals, financial institutions, water systems, power grids, systems for managing government benefits. When these institutions are attacked, it’s the patients, customers, and benefits recipients who stand to lose.
“The same goes for bioterrorism. Although AI will lead to lifesaving advances in drugs and vaccines, it will also make it easier to design a deadly new disease.”
On that particular point, Noah Smith provided a hypothetical example that is too lengthy to include here, but is worth a read:
Gates says that, because AI will affect national security as well as employment, education, taxation, energy, elections, air and water, public health, the financial system, law enforcement, transportation, public lands, and IT systems, federal and international government cooperation in developing safeguards is necessary.
“We do not have the luxury of moving slowly. The place to start is with a process for building the right institutions before the disruption forces governments into crisis mode. National leaders should convene economists, technologists, labor experts, business leaders, and workers themselves regularly to identify where existing institutions are failing and what new authorities may be needed. Countries will need to learn from each other.”
One of the solutions Gates suggests is reserving some jobs for humans, even if AI could do that job as well.
“The Human Reserved domain will evolve over time — for example, we should consider setting aside some jobs now and phasing in AI slowly over years or decades with a commitment to preserve some jobs. Some areas, like education and mental health care, will be a mix, with a human in charge who’s using the technology to extend what they can do.”
On the economic side, he warns that, if AI leaves fewer jobs, fewer people will be paying taxes to cover governmental budgets (which are facing higher and higher debt payments). Companies can write off the cost of AI software and robots they use to replace human labor, so Gates has advocated for taxing tokens and robots to replace the lost revenue from humans.
It is worth reading Gates’ full essay to better appreciate the benefits and dangers of artificial intelligence. AI is here to stay, but with some preparation and strong oversight, it need not be apocalyptic.
AI intrigues me and scares me at the same time time. Maybe the longer essay goes into this. My fear is that AI can fool a certain number of people to believe something that is not true. The upcoming elections, with the acrimony that we have today, is a perfect storm. In my opinion. In past elections, even with just a photoshop, people have been fooled by campaigns that prey on feelings over ideas. With AI technology campaigns can make photos, videos and speeches look real when they are not. Let’s face it, I can be initially fooled, because I want to believe something. Then I go research to see what is actually true. How many people will do this? I have warned people before on social media. It’s easier to believe the knee jerk reaction.
On another note. I was very disappointed when I learned that Bill Gates isn’t a God. That with all the good that the foundation has done over the years with his wife, I learned that he is in fact a flawed individual whose personal behavior is distressing. It didn’t help that he showed up in the Epstein files.
Some of the jobs that will most likely remain will be jobs like plumbers, electricians, etc. in medicine I can see what a positive outcome where physicians could more easily research difficult conditions that otherwise might not be diagnosed correctly. For those of us who love having a liberal arts education. I am concerned that the positive aspects of liberal arts where you further develop your critical thinking and research skills will be hampered by AI. I hope not.
As usual. I ramble on. I hope that I will see you soon.