The boom in AI technology has raised concerns over its potential to replace millions of jobs across the world. This week, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported that around 40% of all jobs will be impacted by the growing AI.
While Gates does not disagree with the stats, he believes, and history has it, that with every new technology comes fear and then new opportunities.
“As we had [with] agricultural productivity in 1900, people were like ‘Hey, what are people going to do?’ In fact, a lot of new things, a lot of new job categories were created and we’re way better off than when everybody was doing farm work,” Gates said. “This will be like that.”
AI, according to Gates, will make everyone's life easier. He specifically mentioned helping doctors with their paperwork, saying that it is "part of the job they don't like, we can make that very efficient," in a Tuesday interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria.
He adds that since there is not a need for “much new hardware,” accessing AI will be over “the phone or the PC you already have connected over the internet connection you already have.”
Gates believes that improvements with OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 were “dramatic since the AI bot can essentially “read and write,” this way it is “almost like having a white-collar worker to be a tutor, to give health advice, to help write code, to help with technical support calls.”
He notes that incorporating new technology into sectors like education and medicine will be “fantastic.”
Microsoft and OpenAI have a multibillion-dollar collaboration. Gates remains one of Microsoft's biggest shareholders.
In his interview with Zakaria at Davos for the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates noted that the objective of Gates Foundation is “to make sure that the delay between benefitting people in poor countries versus getting to rich countries will make that very short[…]After all, the shortages of doctors and teachers is way more acute in Africa then it is in the West.”
However, the IMF had a more pessimistic view in this regard. The group believes that AI has the potential to ‘deepen inequality’ with any politician’s interference.
