Bill Gates warns of 20 years of turmoil before prosperity thanks to AI
In the Decoder podcast broadcast last week, the Microsoft co-founder shared that he is not pessimistic about AI, evaluating it as "the technology with the most profound impact, both in terms of its ability to bring benefits and the speed of social change." He believes humanity will move toward a time of abundance thanks to AI, but the transition period could be chaotic.
"My biggest concern is the transition period in the next 20 years. There will be winners, losers, and a lot of turmoil," he shared.
Gates said he took the 20-year mark because it was a fairly safe choice. Billionaires give an example: while some think humanoid robots will be popular in 2-3 years, others predict it will take 8 years. According to him, if development is not slowed down or stopped, the world will have robots building houses, growing crops, doing surgery, and most goods and services will no longer need human labor.
According to the Microsoft co-founder, while limbs will be replaced by humanoid robots, office tasks such as sales and customer support via phone, or accounting can disappear when AI is performed "significantly cheaper, faster, and even more accurate".
The billionaire said that work plays an important role, giving people a sense of income and purpose in life by motivating them to go to work, build relationships with colleagues, and solve problems. He proposed that some activities such as art, sports, cooking, and childcare should be "preserved" exclusively for humans in the future, even if AI does it better. In addition, some measures such as early retirement and limits on working hours can help maintain a certain level of human employment.
"Humanity in the era of true affluence will have to find a way to organize society and determine its purpose. Hopefully then people will still have control," he said.
At the end of August, Bill Gates also published a 6,000-word article about AI, predicting that many jobs will disappear forever due to the invasion of technology. According to him, as AI and robots become more and more perfect, some jobs need to be reserved for humans.
"I call it a reserve for people. I like the phrase 'conservation for people' because it evokes thoughts of nature reserves - where we could have built houses and roads, but chose not to because the losses would be huge," Gates wrote.
According to Business Insider, in addition to Bill Gates, a number of other technology leaders also warned about job disruption on the road to the era of prosperity. Dario Amodei, CEO Anthropic, assessed that AI has the potential to "improve the quality of life for all", but "the short-term shock will be unprecedented".
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, predicts the transition will be "difficult" and proposed the government subsidize everyone to solve unemployment caused by AI. He argued that technology would reduce the cost of production to the point where everyone could own "anything they want", work would become optional, saving for retirement in 10 or 20 years would not be necessary because money would no longer be important.