The turbulent AI era is here
gatesnotes.com
gatesnotes.com
>AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice.
In all likelihood it will probably fall in the middle, with the likelihood that it will tilt power and money towards the already ultra wealthy (to the surprise of no one). But it will enable ordinary people and small businesses to do cool shit and make their lives better.
I model this as two very strong attractor states (radical abundance and totalitarian power concentration). I believe the latter is way more likely without a concerted effort that we currently seem incapable of.
The “somewhere in the middle” outcomes in my opinion are not AGI-pilled, and only come about if the exponential dies hard in the next year or maybe two - as in, it’s a very specific timing prediction that needs to come true for this scenario to occur.
These are often hard fought bloody and some times brilliantly organized strategic and tactical victories. That took years. Years.
Its portrayed like "oh, good guys stayed home, I guess the dictatorship wins".
Really?
Either everyone, globally, gives up on AI development, or AI is going to be in charge of all human development, and we'll just be along for the ride.
Right now, the work ahead is to shape AI so that the decision making it does as it carries us along is something we like.
AI era has been called the new industrial revolution. I'd just like to point out that the industrial revolution created the British Empire. That's wasn't exactly "in the middle".
e.g most small business rent their premises, and buy goods and services from other tenant small businesses, who buy their raw materials from large landowners. How can a small business survive when all the land is monopolized by the technocrats? All value you add gets taken away as rent. This is why they always talk about taxes on outputs (tokens) instead of inputs (land, energy usage).
It's not an ungrounded hypothetical, that's exactly how society worked for hundreds (thousands?) of years.
It can be both. With vanishing white collar work and decent wages, the middle class gets dragged down to become equal to the lower class.
The point is that we now have superintelligence; either it helps us conquer death, or it poses a massive —say, existential- risk to us all. It’s hard to imagine such a powerful tool resulting in just another century of slightly-better capitalist nationalism.
I guess there could be a second AI winter around the corner that we haven’t seen coming yet. That would be nice! Not likely IMHO, but nice.
Lesson of 2026: there is no "we". Hobbes is dead but still looming over us.
The risk is that it helps some people conquer death, while posing an existential risk to some people. The US has enough problems with its gerontocracy. There has only ever been one president born after 1946. What if you were right and there never was another one born after 1946? Propped up by an immortal Supreme Court on "life" terms, of course.
Life extension is also further fatal to birth rates, of course. I suppose the worst possible outcome is technology that extends life but not working life, so you get a larger and larger population of people too old to look after themselves.
Far more imminent is the very real risk of unbounded greed and power that wields those AIs, in full swing as we watch: unchecked global warming, pollution, poverty, authoritarianism, plummeting biodiversity, and more.
The corporations are like out of control AIs themselves, that will do anything to make their paperclips.
Wait what?
Bill Gates' fear is clearly that everybody thinks this stuff is just kind of mediocre because then the real horror story unfolds - Microsoft stock price collapses into blue chip territory where it firmly belongs.
"What kind of technological advancement do you wish to see in your lifetime?":
> The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test.
https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/im_bill_gates_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/comment/dea5fl...
>The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test.
>Another whole area is vaccines. We need a vaccine for HIV, Malaria and TB and I hope we have them in the next 10-15 years.
Daniel Kokotajlo had the closest prediction for our current world, 5 years ago: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-...
You should adjust that these are the kind of the people with the most prescient accuracy for where we are going again. Their world model is more accurate.
Kokotajlo authored: https://ai-2040.com/
As for Kokotajlo, he's a good SF author, but I don't think it's nearly as good a prediction as it appears at first glance.
Like any SF, he's correct about some things, and way, way off base about others. Specifically, he was mostly correct about short-term (1-2 year horizon) technical aspects, but anyone familiar with how transformers work would have guessed those. I'm not even in AI/rationalia land, but believe I was having these exact conversations by 2021. Specifically about multimodality and steam-of-consciousness ['chain of thought' reasoning]. He is spot-on about chip shortages (to my eyes, his most well-done prediction).
Other thoughts are a storytelling device, like a well-told horoscope. He makes non-categorical statements that were already happening as if they categorically will become a new thing. But really he's just going off the current trend that everyone knows, and thus will be nearly-impossible to falsify. For example, 'People who still remember 2021 think of it as the golden days, when conformism and censorship and polarization were noticeably less than they are now. Just as it is normal for newspapers to have a bias/slant, it is normal for internet spaces of all kinds—forums, social networks, streams, podcasts, news aggregators, email clients—to have some degree of censorship (some set of ideas that are prohibited or at least down-weighted in the recommendation algorithms) and some degree of propaganda.' Sounds scary! But it is literally just saying 'polarization and marketing specialization will continue to deteriorate'.... which, duh. In essence, you could make this statement for 2018-> 2021, or for 2008->2018 and 'feel' just as correct!
Other key thoughts were somewhat off. Specifically, 'It now costs an order of magnitude less compute (compared to 2020) to pre-train a giant model' is kind-of-true, in that it costs less now, but the models have gotten so much bigger that the prices haven't actually gone down much. Might be changing soon, but definitely several years off.
The scariest central prediction that the political stuff rests on is 'After years of tinkering and incremental progress, AIs can now play Diplomacy as well as human experts'. This part, as far as I can tell, is just not true and hasn't changed.
And, well, 2026 predictions are just not correct at all. Some examples: 'Mormons create a “Christian Coalition” internet stack, complete with its own email client, social network, payment processor, news aggregator, etc.' -- basically untrue. I know a few ex-mormons, such a thing is not prolific.
'The US and many other Western governments are gears-locked' The US is far from gears-locked, in fact, it's full-steam ahead to er, well, something.
'“Should I wear shorts today?” “Order some more toothpaste, please. Oh, and also an air purifier.” “Is this cover letter professional-sounding?”' -- kind of correct, but in practice most people just do the last one. I'm not aware of many that give chatgpt agents credit card access (refer to the famous vending machine experiment). But predicting this with GPT3 is not that crazy, cause people were already doing that.
Personally, I am much more biased towards the METR timelines/way of thinking: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/deesrjitvXM4xYGZd/metr-measu...
I found Kokotajilo's response comment to this kind of, idk, immature, and not especially mathematical.
It’s so cute some people think that the extent of mass displacement will be limited to what happens to the unemployed. Oh poor unemployed! Nope, pitchforks will be grabbed. It won’t be rosy. Maybe they dream about having killer robots to defend themselves, but imagine a few hundred million people getting angry within one election cycle.
IDK why so many people romanticize pauper riots and try to wish them into existence. In practice, as long as people don't outright starve, they don't become violent just over losing their jobs.
All the post-1989 wars east of the former Iron Curtain were triggered by nationalism. Not a single one by a class conflict.
They think they will be they ones leading the riots (the precariat will defer to them because they are "smart" apparently?) instead of they themselves being the ones being swarmed by rioters for visibly being just a little too well off.
It's one of those unfortunate aspects of internet information silos where people repeat this phrase to each other but don't really contextualize their opinions in the greater body of history and political thought.
Additionally, I think a lot of people with this opinion don't realize the vast difference in material standards we have today and what was true in the age of Communist revolution and decolonialization. It's tempting to think of material standards as relative and I think inequality is indeed a destabilizing factor in socities, but minimum material standards are true in so much of the world today that I think a class-conscious revolution is much harder in most of the developed and developing world absent other external political forces (e.g. nationalism, decolonoialism, etc)
Wouldn't it be easy to argue that this is because there was more a social safety net to prevent said starvation and by that point people were extremely cynical about revolutionary ideas in a way that is not at all comparable?
Sadly, I agree, that's where this is all headed.
This isn't hard to imagine? We'll elect someone, they will put in place new policies. Maybe they will help, maybe they won't.
Nice thing about real democracies, you don't actually need pitchforks.
> Nice thing about real democracies, you don't actually need pitchforks.
Democracy is not something inherent in any society. It’s a tool wielded by the people.
if their voices are overrun by the powerful, the pitchforks come back out.
>More than 90 percent of executives report no effect of AI use on employment over the past three years, and 89 percent report no impact on labor productivity. Among the minority that do report effects, the results tilt slightly positive for productivity, with an estimated average boost of 0.29 percent. However, executives anticipate much larger effects going forward. They forecast that over the next three years, AI will increase labor productivity by 1.4 percent on average while reducing employment by 0.7 percent, implying a net output gain of roughly 0.8 percent. About two-thirds of the anticipated workforce reduction is expected to come from reduced hiring.
https://www.nber.org/digest/202605/global-evidence-business-...
A 1-2% increase in labor productivity year over year is typical for a mature economy in the absence of a new transformational technology. The 0.7% reduction in workforce is an optimistic prediction by a small minority of executives. Even if that happened across all industries (unlikely), an increase in unemployment from 4.1% to 4.8% over 3 years is hardly pitchfork territory.
Given the current evidence, I find it hard to imagine a realistic scenario where "a few hundred million people get angry within one election cycle". That might change if we see economy-wide 10% productivity gains sustained over a decade, but I'm not holding my breath.
You're using a rhetorical device to imply that they're "falling for" a narrative. "Falling for" only follows if that's why they are making the prediction; this construction doesn't allow that they may have come to this belief on their own.
Xinjiang is an exception; it is heavily publicly surveilled.
Internet censorship is strong. The public still has sway over government policy. When search terms are blocked, the public continues with euphemisms. The government is responsive to public opinion. The government does promote influencers with opinions favorable with CCP goals.
Chinese foreign policy is more dovish than public opinion, especially regarding Taiwan.
“Demand is also being intensified by major investments in infrastructure, manufacturing, reshoring, and AI. Data center growth alone has added a net 315,000 skilled-trade workers over the past five years, according to the report, putting additional pressure on an already tight labor market.”
https://www.morningstar.com/news/pr-newswire/20260825cg32433...
We literally do not have enough trades people to build out data centers and their salaries are increasing as a result. These are skilled labor jobs (plumbers, electricians, IT, etc.). Does Bill Gates care about the rest of the economy outside of SWE?
[0]: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/Cana...
They are for now, but will a robot be able to do them in the near future? I don’t know. But there are probably people working on it.
Those only last as long as data centers are being built. Do you think we're going to keep building more data centers forever?
(EDIT: I am not against AI at all, just trying to understand where this all leads)
hell, if actors are still making movies for the love of the game and competing with cheaper (SOMEHOW! I guess we forgot about Sora already) then the price on those will actually go down
oh no, more indie movies made out of the labor of love, the horror.
"Capital investments" are not a magic money source if the economy is tanked.
The only reason they tolerate the proletariat is the need for labor to handle tasks that still require human beings. That’s what the modern capitalist machine does: it harvests labor. If they manage to eliminate the need for intellectual labor via AI and automate enough physical work using tech like Boston Dynamics and John Deeres, whoever's still around become trash. The reliance on this system of money flowing back and forth ends, because the only reason to maintain it is having people generate wealth for them. Once they can eliminate that "cost," they’ll do it without blinking.
We’re already seeing jobs being wiped out by the tens of thousands with the arrival of AI, and billionaires hoarding capital far beyond what they could ever consume, driven simply by the pleasure of having more than the next guy. We’ve also seen how some are depraved enough to treat human beings as mere resources for their own gratification. Why would them keep people around they don't need anymore? People are failable, expensive to keep and unreliable. If all can be automated, it will be. Expecting wealth distribution from them is also a fantasy. If they cared they would do it now, but the talk is always "when we reach certain goal the riches will tricke down, just wait."
The argument that "there won't be anyone left to buy products and keep capitalism running" might hold true during a transition phase, but that would just be like ripping off a Band-Aid. None of them super-rich will care about the money flow once this structure becomes obsolete and can be replaced by another system that’s more efficient and easier to control.
I think they do care. If someone like Mamdani becomes U.S president in 10 years - when significant segments of the population are unemployed and/or radicalized, the U.S can actually become real socialist - like REAL socialist. That means business owners lose parts or all of their business. What if Musk and Zuckerberg won't like it and fight? They're not really gonna have an army of robots, nothing large enough to take over a country. The state controls the monopoly over violence. The state controls the ability to print dollars to build a bigger army. Legislation will make it impossible for a private citizen to accumulate a private army. Guardrails will be put in place. Governments are not that stupid. I think the super rich have an incentive to see the current system keep ticking and not turn into a shit show, they will have no way to control what happens if it turns into a shit show.
This includes my teenager, who socks away $30/week in a VOO fund account. But yeah, no one can afford to "own (shares in?) the robot factories."
So as an owner of 1 million robots, in a world where there are 1000 rich people to serve, I can have 1000 robots per person to serve them and can do everything for them.
Why do I care about the rest of the population? Why I need them to consume my resources? I already have all the power in the world. I have food, health, security, scientist etc. I don’t need the rest of the humans for anything.
Why currently “the rich” need the rest of humans is: you need baristas, servers, builders to help save time and make life enjoyable for most humans. then you need office workers to do the research, manage wealth of a richer category. So all this chain is needed such as top 1000 people have: housing, food, health, security, etc. that’s all they care. They don’t need the money. That’s the real power.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
And yet I see videos all the time of Indians running contraptions straight out of the steam age in their shacks to make plastic straws or sandals. Or just doing it by hand. Better machines to do these tasks already exist, but are obviously too expensive for them to afford. Why would these hypothetical robots be any more affordable or disruptive to Indian workers in particular?
If anything I think American blue collars would be the ones to worry about.
-- Madame de Pompadour
Ugh, capitalism.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Automated_Luxury_Communi...
It has always resulted in no long term effect on unemployment and higher worker wages.
If you don't understand why that counterintuitive thing has consistently happened for centuries, you probably shouldn't speculate on the current automation wave.
- The biggest geopolitical impact will probably come from AI weapons. Just like previous shifts in weaponry caused the fall of empires , the rise of naval empires and the rise of national modern superpowers, AI may lead to the end of the UN and beginning of something new.
- Societies will change but a plan is not needed and it's most likely useless. Societies adapt , and nobody has ever been able to predict how. Let's not make the same mistake again.
Many people like living next to other people purely for social reasons.
There will obviously still be reasons for people to live close together: humans are social creatures, and centralization allows for more efficient transportation.
Umm what? Humans are social animals and many people LIKE living in cities in close proximity to other people and close to amenities. I do not see a future where we decentralize and spread out because of AI.
It brings people together for mating.
It wasn't only industrialization.
Even today, before AI, once you find a mate, THEN, you move to the suburbs.
Absolutely right about war and technology too. Also right about plans being mostly useless.
Amazing analysis, thanks for this comment!
Sounds great, except it ignores the fact that capital interests have controlled the levers of our faux democracies for decades, with no end in sight.
https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/direct-democrac...
FWIW I am not from Switzerland, I only live there. Direct democracy works great.
If someone else hasn't given a thought yet to Liquid Democracy, I propose they give it a couple of minutes of imaginary thought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
For some real world data there are some studies about (I think) German branch of the Pirate Party using it in internal decision making and there is interesting insight for those curious.
It be nice if we all where allowed to vote on particular laws if interested, and defer certain topics to our delegated experts. (Chat Control for example, would be a non issue then.)
The technology for that approach has been mature enough since the rise of social media and private crypto currencies (as a means of electronic private vote, particularly around usage of smart contracts for delegation). What about the interest and spreading of these ideas? Pretty limited, to non-existent. Some people like to follow leaders, though naturally wouldn't expect it to be the silent majority.
If your measure of "success" is women gaining voting rights in 1990 (!) in the last canton, then yeah, Switzerland is doing great.
More importantly, even if it did contain the solution, there is no obvious way for a country with an already corrupt government to transition to such a thing.
These people making these kind of grand pronouncements either have an embarrassing blind spot, or are not making sincere, but carefully calculated statements.
Just via competition, Chinese researchers are doing much more than Bill Gates could ever hope to do through 'thought leadership' spread the benefits of generative AI.
I'm not against a tax on AI or robots, but I think this may be the big chance we have to look at universal income with new eyes. If jobs are to disappear, why not soften the blow and get rid of some of the inefficiencies many government processes mean in terms of other citizen benefits?
What I worry about more however is the malevolent actors across the AI space. I'd argue that most companies mean well, but chasing profit at all costs can very easily turn into malevolence. Both these and actors being malevolent on purpose needs to have a control function.
Tax profits, it was always the most equitable option.
Personally I think the idea of taxing robots/tokens directly is too narrow an idea.
And I thought he is a smart man. This is so last century thinking. We need to prepare that there will definitely be no jobs for everyone and that will be falling all the time, it’s not a one-time event you should “prepare for”. There’s nothing to prepare, we already have funds and productivity to feed and shelter everyone. UBI is not a privilege, previous generations were slaving 9 to 5 all their lives so we can have it. This is it, arrived, and now, enter a few decades of historical period when all of us waiting for government bureaucrats to realise that UBI is a right.
You'll be waiting forever, then. This isn't something that you can wait to be given to you, it must be taken.
Or, put much more eloquently by one of the greatest Americans:
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress"
- Frederick Douglass
Why do we not push for labor reform, as we did a century ago? Depending on the actual productivity gains from AI broadly, set a new standard of 4-hour workdays. Or 3-day work weeks.
There is no preparing for that.
I doubt we get there to be honest, they all have wealth and power because there are consumers with money. No more consumers, no more wealth and power.
Notice that when you open your mouth, there is no roast chicken that flies in.
For example, you go to the store to get eggs, since everyone has UBI, they decide to also get eggs, the eggs either run out, or the store raises the price, at which either you will get food queues like in the USSR, or everyone will need more UBI to afford eggs. The solution to this is to increase egg production, but this is not instant, and not necessarily a priority, while money transfers are instant.
Are you going to strike? Are we going to take on the government by force?
People need to understand there is no democracy in a post-AGI world.
The power of human collectives comes from a combination of our collective economic power and our physical power. Without either leaders would be smart to just do what the companies paying all the bills ask if they don't want their families to starve too.
This is a baby step, but it's a baby step in the right direction.
One would hope that this would still go down better than destituting large percentages of the world population, but I wonder.
But this quote from Bill is a wrong perspective I think. "reduce job losses" is short term reactive thinking. What you need is adapt to what skillsets the modern world needs. If we have a bunch of leatherworkers, you don't "reduce job losses", you get people to understand the new world and pick up the relevant skills. A job isn't a thing, it's an activity (this reads like an AI wrote it, but it's all hand-written). People can do any job and pick up new ones quickly in the right environment.
Worker protections have almost never been granted by the profiteers... not child labor laws, not weekends, not overtime, not safety regulations, not minimum wage, not workers comp... the working class is not what it is today because of "sharing prosperity" and there's been a lot of prosperity — it's all a series of fights.
We will figure new methods of scarce toy production. To believe otherwise seems delusional to me.
There is also this problem with UBI that I don't know how it can be solved. I see it in a certain percentage of people I know. Maybe 15-20%. As soon as they get paid that money is spent and usually spent on bullshit. Any hint of credit worthiness was used up a long time ago because it is the same process. If you gave them a daily morning UBI amount they would be broke by dinner and hungry. It is very hard to explain what causes this. To pretend this doesn't exist also seems completely delusional to me.
> In a capitalist society, employment is the way most people get the money they need to pay for the basics of life as well as being a key source of dignity and social connection.
> When a community has high unemployment, the ripple effects can be pervasive. Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses. Now imagine similar pressures on both white-collar and blue-collar workers nationwide.
> Waiting until people are already displaced or underemployed will be too late. AI is a structural challenge to the way our economy is organized, and it requires thinking and action now.
----
I agree he should've addressed UBI directly. When he was asked about it in an AMA a decade ago he basically said he's optimistic it can happen eventually but not yet [1]. And in that same AMA he said he wished to see "computers that can read and understand information like humans do" within his lifetime [2]. Now that the latter has happened I wish we could see how his thoughts have changed on the former.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/comment/dea7v1...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/comment/dea5fl...
Where ? who ?
For how long?
Setting up governance bodies and think tanks could be a diversion. He does explicitly suggest a robot and token tax, so that is something.
He does not address the issue of IP theft or the possibility of shutting down AI altogether like medium range missiles (SS20/Pershing II) were removed by treaties. The could be AI treaties with China and Russia, except of course the US has no credibility now compared to the 1980s.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/07/how-bill-gates-m...
For teachers/admins who are on HN: what has worked in a past for a "new way to educate" students to actually be implemented by educators? Does it happen through conferences? Do some states take the lead and others follow? Does it follow from private schools into public schools?
I know AI labs are trying to include teachers here and there... but IME teachers are very "anti-AI", "anti-datacenter", etc. etc. In coastal cities, the unions will be entirely opposed. This seems less of a "can AI be useful for education" question and more around politics and messaging. But I'd love to learn more.
The only thing I've ever seen work is to simply make a tool available to people while giving them meaningful resources to adopt it if they see utility in their specific situation. But admin hates this because it means that they are paying for a thing that some people aren't using and because they want to write "I've revolutionized teaching by integrating X" on their performance review and that doesn't work unless adoption is near-universal.
For AI shit in particular, the ideas have been trash. Mandatory AI summaries of course readings integrated into the discussion platform. Great, now nobody will do the reading. AI tools for "placing" you in history through image generation that constantly generate anachronisms because they are trained on fantasy art. Stuff like that.
Even though this article is new, I'm not sure it has materially new ideas vs what some other labs have been claiming for years.
Enforcing safeguards that apply globally to good and bad actors alike so far as proved quite difficult - compute is essentially the only lever, and that's tenuous at best.
Unlike nuclear arms (where functionally there's a limit at MAD), so far we believe that with enough compute, energy, and algorithms, intelligence will continue to scale (and not only scale - but compound)
If you compare the broad characteristics of the new jobs created to the old jobs displaced by technology historically, they are the same every time: they required higher-level (a) cognitive (b) technical or (c) social skills.
That is it. There is no other dimension to upskill along.
And LLMs are good at all three, probably better than most people already by many metrics. (Yes even social; their infinite patience is the ultimate advantage, and while sycophancy is harmful fixing it is easy.)
Plus AI is improving extremely rapidly. Which means it is probably advancing faster than most people can upskill.
An increasingly accepted premise is that AI can displace junior employees but will need senior employees to steer it. Consider the ratio of junior to senior employees, and how long it takes for the former to grow into the latter. That is the volume of displacement and timeframe to upskill we're looking at, made worse by the fact that if juniors are not hired they likely won't get a chance to upskill at all.
Never in history have we had a technology that was so versatile and rapidly advancing that it could displace a large portion of existing jobs, as well as many new jobs that would be created.
Because the pioneers haven't just been saying, but are screaming the quiet part out loud.
This is a very succint argument that has a technical implication - that correcting errors and misalignment is incredibly important for autonomous AI capabilities in a fundamental way.
The average person thinks this technology is overhyped (like Emily Bender) so how would one even begin to have a conversation with them on the risks?
And I kind of get it! If your primary exposure to AI is Google search summaries (from their cheapest models) and shitty AI graphic design, it makes sense to think it's vastly overhyped.
It's powerful, and very useful in specific situations.
It's not the second coming of jesus christ.
Software development, as opposed to many many other fields also offers nearly unlimited training data and is one of the few areas with modifiable inputs and testable outputs.
Nope. The actual main problem are those people who totally ignore the real costs of AI.
Remind me, when was the last time when billions and trillions of dollars were spent on workers (education, healthcare, insurance, etc. all together)?
You try to compare the capabilities without comparing the costs. That won't do.
I'd love to see anyone building Grokbot or ChatGPT Work talk about how they're thinking about this use case, specifically. It seems greatly important and tractable given how little government websites & forms change over time.
On the other end - yes, it will create massive vectors for abuse & fraud, since govt services are designed to have roadblocks to reduce usage. But fraud has always been possible, even without AI (so many recent examples to pull from).
IMO it's best to maximize social benefits to see where the tradeoffs really are. We won't know until we push on it!
That the government collects taxes and then understaffs the department that distributes the benefit is the first fraud. 30 years after email was invented, why do people have to wait on the phone for hours to talk to a government employee?
I get the sense of "Every Accusation is a confession"
> During my entire life I’ve only had two jobs. In the first one, I played a role in developing software to empower people through my work at Microsoft.
Some of us remember the story/urban legend of Bill Gates "developing" BASIC by retrieving a printout of source code from a dumpster, a process infinitely more efficient than an LLM.
NOTE. "Played a role in developing", not "Played a role BY developing"
The former could be said by the coffee maker. Or dumpster diver.
The greatest equalizer ?
Where you're either dependent on some other companies services, that you can afford their fee and that they don't ban your account or that you can afford the hardware to run a model locally made by the formementioned conmpanies?
The internet had a bigger chance of being a equalizer because you could learn things you didn't even knoe about before and what you learned is yours
I've been waiting for a long, long time for us to figure out how AI makes us more social, not less. Outside of memes of course.
I see, so force china to cooperate or label them as terrorists in the same vein of irak/iran nuclear capabilities
We don't even need to assume this is out of the goodness of their hearts. Consider that Microsoft is one of the few Big Tech businesses whose business model is primarily making its enterprise customers more productive. If agents replace all knowledge work, half of Microsoft's business disappears.
In that sense Microsoft is more aligned with us humans than the other AI companies.
So much for those people who tried to claim they knew how to prompt AI better then the next person.
During my entire life I’ve only had two jobs. In the first one, I played a role in developing software to empower people through my work at Microsoft.
Yikes. We all know powerful people have an incentive to whitewash their pasts but there is whitewashing and then there is whatever that is.
I have to mention this because we can't forget that Microsoft's and Bill Gates's history regarding fear uncertainty doubt as well as embrace extend extinguish. "Forgive but don't forget" as the old saying goes.
During the 2000's Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer described the GPL as akin to a virus. He begged European governements not to adopt open source software and to adopt Microsoft software instead.
Indeed throughout its history Microsoft, along with Gates and Balmer, have consistently fought against implementation of open standards and open source software. They have consistently pushed towards their own proprietary solutions.
Given all of this, along with the laughable whitewashing attempt even at the very beginning of his essay, I feel like what Bill Gates has written here is consistent with his previous behavior in regards to all of this. I suspect all this talk of regulation is an attempt to squash open source AI and open weights AI and to ensure Big Tech such as Microsoft continues to be in control of the future of tech and the future of AI.
Even his talk of taxing AI tokens and robots would ultimately benefit Microsoft and other Big tech companies and hurt open source.
I will repeat what I said earlier. In life it is important to "forgive but never forget." Many have forgiven Bill Gates for all he did in the 90's. Many haven't. But nobody should forget and everyone should take his words with a grain of salt.
I'm curious, how? He proposes taxing bots in lieu of taxing humans, because they will be doing most of the work... but we already tax humans, and it hasn't hurt open source.
The manually moved it down.
HN mods always silence even the slightest thing against their official narrative.
Since YC/HN are themselves pedos and connected to Epstein they had no choice but to squash it
They probably thought the HN audience would be too dumb or passive to do anything about it, helping them slowly get away with being international sec trafficking pedophiles.
And so far they are getting away with it. JPM Chase bank settled with victims for millions of dollars, other victims mysteriously died.
Thiel and tech and academia and Israel got prolific pedo Trump as the figurehead so they can try to shift blame to his “base” of racists Americans etc. but we all know it’s the wealthy corporate elite doing this stuff.
HN is complicit. They are basically a mouthpiece.
HN mods actively help wealthy pedophiles get away with their crimes
How about you start with not paying Microsoft's CEO $96M?
Let AI replace jobs. Start taxing companies that use AI proportionally to their usage, and then distribute the proceedings to the people.
—AKIRA, 1988
i honestly think there is 40% chance the world will be total mess. i know students from top Uni who are graduating and they can’t find positions to work in in California.
Entry-level consensused by all of my friends is in deep trouble.
something must change. dramatically. and soon.
i am all in on AI. and this is scary for the rest of the world. and it should be
I see an old (and successful) pirate king trying to wear yet another hat today.
The anti-capitalist argument is that the wealthiest people in the world are not dramatically more intelligent than the average person. Bill Gates is obviously very intelligent and capable, but his IQ does not scale with his wealth. He built the right company at the right time, and Microsoft ended up sitting at the center of massive network effects. Relatively modest advantages in judgment, skill, and industriousness can end up producing enormous differences in wealth due to the compounding effects of success.
That's just how scalable markets work. So Gates's success, while evidence that he was very effective at building Microsoft, is not evidence that he is vastly more knowledgeable than everybody else about economics or the future of technology.
And the same applies to Bezos, Musk, and every other extremely successful founder.
Their arguments should be judged on their merits and not treated as infallible insights from people with superhuman intelligence.
Now, that is not to say that I want their wealth to be capped or politically reallocated. The case for private property depends on the argument that decentralized ownership and investment and capital risking is better than politicians allocating a pool of resources to gain clout or win over popular opinion. A wealth cap or high taxes on the wealthy would transfer control over resources from private owners to political institutions. So what we would be doing is replacing imperfect private allocation with imperfect public allocation, where the people allocating the capital have limited information, political incentives, and the ability to impose costs on others without their consent. So I reject blind deference to billionaires, but I do not want politicians to control billionaires' capital.
Anyway, let me address Gates's argument about AI:
Gates argues that AI will disrupt the economy faster than previous technologies, and therefore stronger government coordination is needed to address the rapidity of the speed of that transition, to cushion people against the speed of that transition. But what his analysis underweights is how quickly AI can help people adapt to the very transformation that AI brings about.
For example, a worker taking on a new position now has access to a tutor and an analyst and a business advisor all wrapped up in one, who can provide world-class assistance 24/7 at the cost of a few cents in electricity. And someone who wants to start a business can employ dozens of AI agents at a cost of a few hundred dollars to test out the idea and build out a prototype within a few days. So what this means is that we cannot hold the human adaptive capacity constant while trying to determine the impact of AI's disruptive capacity.
The second problem with Gates's argument is that he only counts the income that people might lose when AI replaces jobs, but he doesn't count the fall in prices that the same AI will bring about. The fall in prices is effectively an increase in purchasing power. That increase in purchasing power, in economic terms, means an increase in real wages, and that's exactly why wages increased twentyfold between 1826 and 2026. Automation brought about abundance, which reduced prices and thereby increased purchasing power, i.e. increased real wages. If you look at tokens right now, their prices are going down exponentially. They've gone down about a thousandfold over the last four years, while the capability of the tokens themselves has increased. So AI is following exactly the same price trends as every other previous computer technology.
If AI becomes a major input into medicine and education and administration and logistics, that means that all these goods and services become radically cheaper, which means that paychecks can buy a lot more of them. So that's, I think, a huge hole in his analysis. It's also, I think, very simplistic to assume that the future will be based on labor. It could very well be one where the average person becomes a business owner and employs a fleet of hundreds or thousands of AI agents to work for them. That's exactly what the price trends in tokens would suggest.
The broader problem I see with his model is that it assumes disaster from a technology that creates abundance. This seems to me to be fundamentally misguided about the essential dynamics of what's actually happening.
Finally, if AI is ever capable of doing every single thing that a human can do, AI would possess very dangerous traits. And why I say that is because humans themselves are very dangerous. If we're going to create a product, we're not going to create a product that has human-like traits. But it is some of those very traits that make humans dangerous that also make them useful in the economy. We tolerate humans having these dangerous properties because that's what we were born into, and we accept that and we legally protect humans despite the fact that they're dangerous. But nobody, no company, no country will tolerate people creating AI that is dangerous. An autonomous, self-motivated and potentially rebellious digital intelligence is not only not a useful business tool, it's also not a tolerable risk. And if that is ever created, we will have much bigger things to worry about than unemployment and no solution to the problems that this would create would be found in greater taxation.
And as long as that is not created, then there will be abilities or skills that humans uniquely possess that will become the limiting factor in the economy. In other words, all other processes will scale exponentially through mass production of GPUs until all the available scarce human skills are employed in managing those GPUs. That follows the basic pattern that has preceded us over the last 200 years, and there's no reason to assume that pattern will not hold.
These llm agents don’t have “agency”. No intrinsic goal other than respond. A tutor has judgment and agency. You will get a really good pattern match on the input text you give but you won’t get tutoring.
Bro is a useless sex offender, who cares what he thinks about anything.
The weirdest part is HN hiding the comments lmao
So we are on a weird combination of science (look Language can be modelled, how does that relate to real world concepts, can you even understand the word love without experiencing emotions) and ultra-capitalism (you get that part)
So my first thought is you cannot monetise AGI
I honestly don’t know where that line is, and different humans will draw it in different places but if (it’s a big if) we do achieve AGI by throwing compute at a pile of language (and seriously that is wrong way round for evolution?) if we do get a model everyone just recognised as alive then, just who in society is going to say “yeah slavery that’s the right approach - those companies definitely should be allowed to keep a data centre of Einsteins, not pay them, and replace call centres for zero cost.”
The goal of the journey just is not monetiseable. If we do create alien intelligence we really want to treat it like they landed in a spaceship.
Plus you know there is bound to be a Hollywood film in productions already about an evil billionaire who creates an AI and tries to lock it away and make it do his bidding. It ends badly.
But even putting AGI aside and just focusing on a word guessing machine that can check its own guesses over and over, you know not an actual intelligent thing but something that is a tool.
Just how much of the amazing cost savings and job replacements from LLMs are really just low hanging fruit available to POS (Plain Old Software). Very very few companies are what Inwoukd call software literate - run through and through with programmatically accessible components at every level and people with skills to use them. The old SOA / API based company is first rung on that ladder.
But the point is, almost every time we are going to replace some jobs it’s “we never digitised this before but now we can just chuck compute at it.” You know what’s cheaper than chuckingncompute at it - doing the hard graft of getting your software and data aligned and then fixing your processes. Then it can run like the scripts that intern wrote last year but no one listened. Yes CV is used in killchains in Ukraine - but the whole killchain is not AI - it’s hard graft building a process just like any business. With AI used as small Part of a larger ecosystem.
Oh and yeah the AI labs and the chip vendors - they are not keeping the value created by firing paralegals. Data centres with almost identical models in them just become utilities.
And did I say value created ? So far all the big value is cost reduction - you know the refuge of the business consultant with no ideas.
I still am waiting for the big new thing - the company that could not exist otherwise. All I hear is cost reduction and yeah that matters at scale, but if it’s all I hear I begin to suspect it’s all anyone can think of.
And moving value around does not count as value creation - Amazon has done amazing things, but if e-commerce did not exist, would humans in America have never bought crap from China ? Or has amazon just mostly taken the growth of the past 30 years away from Walmart ?
And talking of that, Amazon has massively reduced warehousing costs - using POS, and these things called robots. If I had to bet it would be the AI revolution (maths proofs apart) is a robot revolution. And that has the usual scaling laws of design, manufacture, deployment and so on.
Maybe the reason I am Not seeing a AI killer app, is that the iPhone does not have arms.
Anyway needed to get that off my chest :-)
> During my entire life I’ve only had two jobs.
One of them was Steve; and another one has been wasting endless amount of human effort on closed-source software with anti-standard behavor. But then maybe there's the other job of covering up his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein etc.?
How apt… for Bill Gates to state this.
Might this be a part of a PR campaign to distract us from his "Island trips"?
That title already belongs to the handgun.
I am finding it difficult to take anything Gates says seriously. Remember, 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
This is one of those countersmells that flags people as unserious. It was at best an amusing quip from the days of extended memory PCs about why they should move to modern OSes.
Gates, of course, was talking about the address mapping design points in software on a CPU that had 20 address bits. Unless you're arguing that 384k was too much for the paltry framebuffers actually deployed on 8086's and would have preferred a 896/128 split; in which case I agree! But alas.
Gates in one of his reddit amas has said that he never said that. No one working on computers during those days would have said they need less memory.
I really think this is overstated. So far everything is pointing towards AI accelerating climate change. Especially if we'll automate everything with physical robots.
Ok but if we sprint the Delorean towards the brick wall as fast as possible we might be able to hit 88mph just in time to save ourselves