Bill Gates Claims ‘Bad Stuff Is Imminent’ As AI Accelerates
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates alleged that artificial intelligence is advancing faster than society can contain it.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates alleged that artificial intelligence is advancing faster than society can contain it.
The tech titan said the world is unprepared for AI’s increased ubiquity in his Wednesday essay, “The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical.” Gates claimed AI could soon act against human interests, design biological weapons and displace workers, among the many arguments in his essay calling for a global slowdown on AI.
“The good stuff is moving a bit slowly, and … other than robots, I’d say the bad stuff is imminent,” Gates told Axios Wednesday.
“e need time to prepare for the social, political, and economic upheaval we are about to enter,” he said in his essay, which laid out the ways he believes “bad actors who have relatively little power now” will be enabled to do harm to the world with AI.
Gates warned that cybersecurity attacks on infrastructure and “bioterrorism” should make people concerned about AI’s progress.
“Although AI will lead to lifesaving advances in drugs and vaccines, it will also make it easier to design a deadly new disease,” Gates wrote. “Again, the positive capabilities are hard to separate from the dangerous ones. This is a global problem.”
RAND recently outlined a plan with several mitigating strategies to restrict bad actors from creating biological weapons with AI tools such as Anthropic’s Claude.