"Bill Gates is a fascinating person in the artificial intelligence debate right now. He is somebody with experience in several of the different perspectives that most people can only hold one of: He was a revolutionary technologist who built some of the foundations of the future that we’re now living in. When he was chief executive of Microsoft, he was a corporate leader. He has felt the momentum of corporate competition — Microsoft, of course, is still in some of the race dynamics present in A.I. And then, as chair of the Gates Foundation, he has been working with governments around the world on regulatory issues, poverty alleviation and equity for many years.
Very few people combine technological experience, corporate experience and governmental experience in quite the way he does.
So his recent essay on A.I., in which he says that he is staking his reputation on trying to get people to see how bad what is coming might be and trying to get them to see that we are not ready for what is about to happen, was something...
We see the beginnings of control issues with things like the Hugging Face hack, where at least experimental A.I.s are breaking out of sandboxes and coordinating to do things that are way outside the scope of what we would want them to do. But again, those are nonrelease systems — Anthropic withheld Mythos, trying to create more cybersecurity.
So why is anything needed beyond — and is anything needed beyond? — the simply natural incentives under capitalism and normal corporate reputational management?
Well, I almost can’t believe you’re asking that. This is the most dangerous thing that humans have ever gone near.
In other areas, do we just say: Hey, release your drugs? There’s no F.D.A., there’s no airline safety board, there’s no requirement that cars use seatbelts. Do we just use the liability laws to try and keep humans safe? You know: Oh, you’re shipping opioids. Somebody should just sue you.
I mean, we’ve created a society that tries to keep people safe not by saying: Oh, we can bankrupt the person who does that.
And you say there’s filtering. There’s no filtering. You can take an open-source model that can create bioweapons and disable any monitoring of any kind, and this exists today.
So no, there is no filtering of any kind. And so say you kill 100 million people — you want to use a lawsuit?
I almost can’t keep a straight face.
Well, this is not my view, but it is President Trump’s view. It is the Trump adviser David Sacks’s view. To some degree, it’s Jensen Huang’s view, and so that’s why I’m putting you in conversation with it, because it is the governing view of the United States of America at this moment.
No, it’s fair to say that outside of the industry, the awareness of the dangers of A.I. is extremely low. And you can say that of academia, you can say that of think tanks, you can say that of policymakers, politicians.
And part of the reason I’m speaking so loudly — as loud as I can — is that you can’t rely on the industry to self-regulate here. I mean, it’s just insane."
