If AI is really that powerful, shouldn't someone like Gates be able to end hunger and homelessness with a one-time capital expenditure? Somehow "give people jobs" is the primary problem he wants to solve, not ending poverty. It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.
They probably didn't read it. The Parent comment suggests Bill is saying AI is wildly powerful, more precisely Parent comment is implying Bill has ulterior motives because AI isn't that powerful yet as he fear-mongers.
The actual text Bill wrote is more about highlighting upcoming problems and convincing governments to work together on potential harms coming soon.
>It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.
This is the foundation of the economy. AN engine needs energy to keep going and workers are that energy. AI serves to automate a lot of that energy... but this leads to a side effect.
The side effect is that the economy is a self feedback loop, as workers not only run the engine but they also create the fuel that they themselves run on. If workers aren't working and AI has replaced them then what where are companies getting money from if workers can no longer buy things from the company? This is the fundamental loop of how an economy works... money gets paid to workers, workers spend the money and the loop continues and the economy self improves... If workers are replaced the economy no longer works.
You're addressing a flaw and an imperfection in the existing infrastructure (poverty),The article is talking about the very engine that maintains society itself which in theory can completely break if AI is introduced.
I don't know if it will ACTUALLY break, the circumstances surrounding all of this are very very complex that no one can fully predict the outcome but the theory behind it is legit and much more significant then a poverty issue.
He is planning to leverage AI with significant capital expenditures:
> The Gates Foundation has 19 years left of the 20 years in which it will spend its remaining $200 billion. AI will help it achieve its ambitious goals by both accelerating the discovery of vaccines and medicines for HIV, TB, malaria, and malnutrition and helping the healthcare workforce and patients know how to use those tools. The foundation’s goals include cutting the number of children who die every year in half again, as was done from 2000 to 2024. All of our work, not just health but also agriculture and education, will take full advantage of AI.
---
I think "maintaining the working poor" is a strange misread of "give people jobs". His point is that people get a ton of meaning out of their work in our current capitalist system, and regardless of whether or not we change our system in the long term, if we don't do something about jobs in the short term, there will be a civil crisis:
> 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.
Ending poverty is a purely mechanical problem, with very straightforward solutions if you have robots that can do any mechanical task. You don't need to give anyone a job, you just need to give them food and shelter. (Ideally also medicine, but it sounds like that part at least he's thinking about, although again, perhaps not for anyone who doesn't already have it.)
Curing diseases and making people feel fulfilled are great goals, but they're not the primary ones in my mind. They are in Gates' mind because those are the biggest challenges he has personally experienced in his life.
Making the structural changes to our economy should be trivial if AI works as well as he's supposing it will. We won't need an economy at all, not to solve the problems caused by unemployment. (And that's the thing, is unemployment is not the actual problem, it is a cause of problems, but AGI would give us easy alternatives to the fundamentally unattainable goal of full employment.)
I still think there is a contradiction he glossed over. In a capitalist society, jobs have a dual role that is sometimes paradox: For workers and employees, jobs are a source of income, skill, status and participation; for the (capitalist) state, a job is often a justification why the worker deserves to exist. But for the employer, jobs are a cost center and expenditure that should be minimized - that was why this tech was developed in the first place.
The state papers over that contradiction with the idea of perpetual economic growth, where the economic activity simply grows so fast that more jobs are created than are lost by efficiency improvements.
Gates is somehow expecting that "we" (whoever that is) agree just like that to keep certain jobs from being replaced by AI, even if they could. But that would go against all the forced and incentives that make up the dynamic of the current system.
One is the obvious one, to produce things. AI can somewhat help with that, although less than you might think because it's largely producing knowledge output rather than physical things. If AI lets one knowledge worker do the work of 10, the effect of that is to free up 9 knowledge workers to take up manual labor, it's not to make manual laborers 10x more productive.
The second purpose is to distract people from attempting to work on their own interests and instead corral them into working for others'. You see examples of this in the form of acquihires (where they obviously don't need you to do the work, they already have a competing product, but they do need to take your product off the market), and in bullshit jobs, and in think tanks and consulting firms and legal machinery. It's a form of social control and a means to maintain social order, not a requirement for actual productivity. When you don't give people a job to do, they start working for their own interests, and their own interests frequently conflict with others. And we've seen that over and over again: the Great Depression nearly led to a fascist coup in the U.S. [1] and did result in fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain, and large communist movements in France and China. The COVID pandemic and subsequent lockdowns led to widespread protests and civil unrest in the U.S. and other countries.
Popular discourse concentrates almost exclusively on the first purpose, because the second one is icky to talk about. In reality most people are individually better off being independently wealthy and not working, but society can only absorb so many free agents with their own ideas and wills to power. (This is also why retirement and stay-at-home parenting are broadly institutionalized: it's okay for people to not work when they no longer have the energy to work, it's only dangerous when people are not working and yet have the energy to do things other than working). But the second reason actually has more explanatory power. If you assume that the true reason for employment is to take people out of the competitive will-to-power market, lots and lots of irrational moves suddenly make sense, like high-paid executives, bullshit jobs, bureaucratic incompetence, projects where billions are invested and then the whole thing is canceled, competing internal divisions, people not getting fired for doing nothing, etc. The whole point is for them to do nothing.
There's a Chesterton's Fence [2] issue at work here. Many people, particularly young people, grow up with the first explanation for work and take it at face value, and then a new technology comes around that saves all this work and they're like "Of course this is a good idea! I want to be part of it!" But if the actual purpose of work is to distract people from pursuing their own interests, this is incredibly dangerous. The actual consequence is going to be widespread unrest and quite possibly war.
Gates is worth about $100B, Elon Musk about $850B. Let's call it $1T altogether. That would be at most about $115 per human on Earth (~8.5B humans). Not sure that is sufficient to "end hunger and homelessness."
Your calculation only makes sense if every one of those 8.5B humans is suffering from hunger and homelessness. Somewhere around 1 in 1000 people are homeless (https://worldmetrics.org/global-homelessness-statistics/), and 1 in 12 or so has experienced "hunger" some time in the past year (https://www.fao.org/hunger/en/). Obviously the numbers depend on how you define "homelessness" and "hunger", but in any case this multiplies the $ that could be used to help individuals by those factors. Between $1000 (hunger) and $115,000 (homelessness) may not sound like a lot, but when your yearly income is around $1000, it can mean a lot.
Does anyone else feel incredibly nostalgic for the time when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were the richest people on earth? I remember feeling pretty good about the fact that they were trying to do so much good, and about the giving pledge. Things feel so different now.
Few people were more vicious than Gates when he was running Microsoft. Maybe Larry Ellison but Gates was smarter and more cunning. I don't feel nostalgic about those days and Gates is just trying to buy his way into heaven and a positive view on his wikipedia page.
No because Bill Gates was hanging out with Jeffery Epstein that entire time. I also feel like people forgot his insanely evil business practices from the 80s and 90s? Bill Gates has always been one of the worst people out there. Every bit as bad as Musk. It's a big club, we're just not in it.
I think it will be seen similar to the crypto craze to be honest. People on this very site, with an actual reputation, were telling us non stop how we were losers who were going to be left behind and stay poor. They never had to apologize for being obnoxious when that didn’t happen
Comparing AI to crypto makes zero sense. We get tremendous use from AI right now, while 2 decades after invention of crypto there are still basically zero legitimate use cases. I repeat - the utility of AI is not some hypothetical but something that happens right now at very large scale (so please don't reply with something in line "well, crypto was supposed to have lots of uses also").
> while 2 decades after invention of crypto there are still basically zero legitimate use cases.
The first card on the homepage of the DTCC (https://www.dtcc.com/) is "Tokenization". This is a legitimate use case and is being adopted at the largest institutional level. Stablecoins are yet another legitimate use case.
Edit: for what it's worth, I do agree that the crypto craze was insane. I also think the AI craze is insane, even though I agree that its current proliferation is larger than crypto.
where? All i see is getting bugged with slop and for learning i returned to textbooks. Even code i get from it is stuff i would earlier copy paste from SO.
After 2 years i feel mostly distracted by it. There are usecases ofc but encountering a chatbot or AI written posts, software, etc. is still a negative.
Literally everywhere. I'm running a scientific project where I've got to inspect large amount of whole-body MRI segmentations. The software available on market is very clunky for doing that, so I've asked Claude to write one perfectly tailored for my use case. With all the helper functions I've asked it to implement, the software sped up reviews >4x. And I couldn't write it myself.
I agree there are usecases, but image classification is not the hype. Still - that's great, can we get a link? Or let me guess it's internal, you don't want to doxx yourself?
Knowing medical software requirements, which might be there for a reason, i highly doubt this will see production.
> I agree there are usecases, but image classification is not the hype. Still - that's great, can we get a link? Or let me guess it's internal, you don't want to doxx yourself?
Why would I distribute software that's tailor made for me? I don't want to deal with headaches associated with distributing it.
> Knowing medical software requirements, which might be there for a reason, i highly doubt this will see production.
It won't, the software is not a point of my work, it's just a tool for my actual project which has nothing to do with programming (very useful tool but still - not a goal on it's own).
Or maybe it's not just a craze and we'll soon look back and think "I wonder what we might've done differently if we'd been clear-eyed about what was happening."
Show me a person who truly revised their priors to put forward a novel solution to AI that isn't just "do the thing that I like and that benefits me in some way". The discourse around all this is a mix of quasi-religious beliefs (pro and con) and blatant opportunism. For Dario and Sam, the solution is "give us a monopoly on this tech". For Gates, it's "create an supranational organization with unprecedented taxation and regulatory powers" - world AI police, presumably staffed by technocrats like him.
What's your take? Do the ideas put forward by Gates strike you as worth pursuing? What are the trade-offs - how can they go wrong?
Can you describe a method of slowing frontier AI development that you yourself would not classify as monopoly-seeking by US AI companies or power-seeking by governments and technocrats?
Limiting the development of powerful AI requires restricting free enterprise in some way, backed by the threat of force; hence, there will always be a cynical framing available.
> Do the ideas put forward by Gates strike you as worth pursuing? What are the trade-offs - how can they go wrong?
I agree. However, why aren’t we applying the same standard to AI technologies themselves? That doesn’t strike me as worth pursuing, the article discusses all the ways that is and will go wrong
It goes back to the industrial revolution and every revolution before and after. There was a point where they thought a majority of people would be working as switchboard operators and then telephone switching came along. Horses to cars, etc.
Jobs transition, new space is created, people are caught in tbe crossfire of supply and demand curves. Incan agree the bullwhip of this one is going to be aggressive.
I think it is a mistake to bet on AI as a driver of meaningful growth in a commercial capacity in the current state. When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium.
I think the world at large is "learning on the job" what data scientists and others in ai have known for a long, several decades long, time have already known.
But Bill stopped being involved in Microsoft’s day to day business over a decade ago. And he’s making valid arguments that don’t require us to trust him. Do you not think labor disruption, cyberattacks, and mass surveillance are big risks from powerful AI?
>The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history. Right now, we are not preparing adequately for that transition. If the world takes the right steps, AI will be a force for good and leave everyone better off.
It will be a force for good. But like all evolutionary steps the path to good will be paved with darkness.
The very existence of humanity and life itself rests on the foundation of natural selection. Humanity will be better, it will get better but before we get there... there will be a culling.
It's an unfortunate truth. We all might be culled.
Sandbags against a tsunami. When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out?
What we need is deep thinking on the implications and make the default way forward one where we want to go. In other words, we build a channel for the flood waters, not a wall. Creating a role for "somebody to deal with AI issues" is one of those hand-wavvy upper management moves that looks defensible but simply passes the buck to someone who structurally lacks the agency to actual move the needle.
> When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out?
the only thing i can think of was when that Chinese scientist produced gene edited human babies. He was pretty much excommunicated from the scientific community and, eventually, spent some time in jail.
AI, on the other hand, has a huge profit potential and way too far out of the bag to go back in. To quote the movie Terminator, "it will never stop".
What surprises me even more is why Bill Gates writes this kind of bizarre, low-quality nonsense in the first place. What purpose does it serve? It’s so obviously shallow that it influences nothing and adds nothing to the conversation.
"A lot of people are skeptical of AI because it makes mistakes. But what's going to happen when it stops making mistakes??? It'll change the world!"
Honestly I suspect he's probably just cynically talking his book. All of this "AI is scary good / it'll be even scarier gooder soon" is no less advertising than slapping a cigarette logo on a racing car.
AI are improving their capacity at blazingly fast rate. Is noticing that AI psychosis? I'd say that believing that we are at the peak of LLM capabilities is some kind of psychosis due to large dose copium inhalation.
I've tried to type this up a couple times, each time backing out because at the end of the day, I really don't give a rats fart about anything Gates has to say. I just wish he would disappear.
640k ought be enough for this AI. I'm not sure takes like these are helpful. It's widely acknowledged that this is a technological shift, like electricity, like industrialization, etc. It could be (good or bad) but most likely (good AND bad). Does anyone really believe, sincerely, that AI will be the great equalizer? It's a hilarious proposition. They are working their hardest to make sure that its not imo.
I'm sorry. I absolutely do not trust Bill Gates. His history of ruthless, cutthroat tactics in the 90s is not easily forgotten and when he proposes things like international organizations to audit everyone's AI[1] I can't help but question his motives.
I also don't understand what gives him the moral standing to propose a solution at all. He's not the fucking pope but a ruthless tech businessman with vested financial interest in the technology involved. He should stick to his lane.
[1]
> But even a country that gets its own house in order will still be exposed to risks that cross borders. This is why an international organization will need to be built in parallel.
> It will be unlike any other institution we have ever created, though it can follow the model of some existing systems. There’s an inspections regime for nuclear weapons, regulations for international aviation, and agreements that protect the ozone layer. A new global organization for AI will need elements of all three and more.
> ruthless tech businessman with vested financial interest in the technology involved
Isn't that past-tense? What's his financial interest these days? He still owns a small amount of MSFT, but he doesn't exactly have control over the corporation any more. I imagine Nadella always answers his calls, but I'd bet most CEOs will make time to take a call from Bill.
Interesting that you chose the pope as a positive control. I'd say that taken the whole history of papacy into question, there is no particular reason to trust the pope either.
If you’re one of the people wondering why there’s an enormous backlash to AI, here’s your answer: “this thing we’re building is going to he fucking terrible and ruin your life. Please give us all your money to build it.”
It’s exactly the same set of questions and challenges as with nuclear power
Nuclear power is one of the most amazing magical things on the planet but nuclear weapons present a massive challenge to social coordination. So maybe we should sit as a society and try to figure out how to manage that instead of just freak out and burn all of our own faces off because we can’t handle complex conversations.
No? Nuclear never had those massive valuations. Did not hyped itself this ridiculous way. Was not forced down on everyone. And the vision of nuclear power was not "make humans obsolete".
We did not had nuclearmaxxing. We did not had doomtrolling from nuclear companies.
While nuclear power is not intrinsically anti human you can't really separate the public perception of nuclear power and that of nuclear weapons. Anti nuclear sentiment is a lot easier to understand when you realize everyone who grew up under the Cold War had went through nuclear attack drills.
> It’s exactly the same set of questions and challenges as with nuclear power
I'm not sure "provide cheap and plentiful power that may be risky if not managed correctly" is really on the same level as "replace all human labor we possibly can"
I agree with you that ideally we would coordinate and cooperate better, but the sad problem (the prisoner's dilemma, really) is that some (many? most? all?) people will not coordinate or cooperate no matter what, especially if they have an opportunity to get ahead by not cooperating. As long as people like that exist we have to find ways to work with them or work around them
It doesn't help that people with the most wealth seem like they mostly have that sort of personality
All his good things (possibly help medicine! agriculture! government!) involve a belief in ever-increasing superintelligence and so much "hope" and optimimusm and may not ever exist.
All his negative things (increase of fraud, skill atrophy, cyberattacks, removing employment, consolidation of capital and wealth) exist currently now with AI as it is.
How long will negatives outweigh the positives? And will those positives ever actually come to fruition? How anyone (who is not a sociopath and expects to be one of those pyramid tops) can see a bright future is beyond my pessimism and sense of reality as it is now.
We should not be listening to a man who drugged his wife with Epstein supplied antibiotics after getting an STD (among many, many other bad things he's done).
Looking at the exceedingly long history of someone's immoral actions and deeds isn't a "1-bit value judgement". The guy literally teamed up with a pedophile pimp foreign spy to drug his wife. I'll pass on hearing his thoughts about literally anything.
It's up to us, the public, to defend our society from deteriorating. There's no reason to defend Epstein's billionaire friends, you have nothing to gain from that.
"In my second one, which I started full time in 2008, I am giving back the wealth I made at Microsoft with the goal of making the world a healthier, better educated, and more equitable place."
Like inventing waterless toilets when people just need access to clean water ?
The sad story is that we don't need innovation, we need better politics.
Oh and he could open source windows, that would make us more equitable for sure.
If AI is really that powerful, shouldn't someone like Gates be able to end hunger and homelessness with a one-time capital expenditure? Somehow "give people jobs" is the primary problem he wants to solve, not ending poverty. It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.
> It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.
I wonder how the hell did you arrive at this conclusion from this text.
They probably didn't read it. The Parent comment suggests Bill is saying AI is wildly powerful, more precisely Parent comment is implying Bill has ulterior motives because AI isn't that powerful yet as he fear-mongers.
The actual text Bill wrote is more about highlighting upcoming problems and convincing governments to work together on potential harms coming soon.
Have you ever played a game where everything is free? Most people would call this "broken".
>It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.
This is the foundation of the economy. AN engine needs energy to keep going and workers are that energy. AI serves to automate a lot of that energy... but this leads to a side effect.
The side effect is that the economy is a self feedback loop, as workers not only run the engine but they also create the fuel that they themselves run on. If workers aren't working and AI has replaced them then what where are companies getting money from if workers can no longer buy things from the company? This is the fundamental loop of how an economy works... money gets paid to workers, workers spend the money and the loop continues and the economy self improves... If workers are replaced the economy no longer works.
You're addressing a flaw and an imperfection in the existing infrastructure (poverty),The article is talking about the very engine that maintains society itself which in theory can completely break if AI is introduced.
I don't know if it will ACTUALLY break, the circumstances surrounding all of this are very very complex that no one can fully predict the outcome but the theory behind it is legit and much more significant then a poverty issue.
He is planning to leverage AI with significant capital expenditures:
> The Gates Foundation has 19 years left of the 20 years in which it will spend its remaining $200 billion. AI will help it achieve its ambitious goals by both accelerating the discovery of vaccines and medicines for HIV, TB, malaria, and malnutrition and helping the healthcare workforce and patients know how to use those tools. The foundation’s goals include cutting the number of children who die every year in half again, as was done from 2000 to 2024. All of our work, not just health but also agriculture and education, will take full advantage of AI.
---
I think "maintaining the working poor" is a strange misread of "give people jobs". His point is that people get a ton of meaning out of their work in our current capitalist system, and regardless of whether or not we change our system in the long term, if we don't do something about jobs in the short term, there will be a civil crisis:
> 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.
Ending poverty is a purely mechanical problem, with very straightforward solutions if you have robots that can do any mechanical task. You don't need to give anyone a job, you just need to give them food and shelter. (Ideally also medicine, but it sounds like that part at least he's thinking about, although again, perhaps not for anyone who doesn't already have it.)
Curing diseases and making people feel fulfilled are great goals, but they're not the primary ones in my mind. They are in Gates' mind because those are the biggest challenges he has personally experienced in his life.
Making the structural changes to our economy should be trivial if AI works as well as he's supposing it will. We won't need an economy at all, not to solve the problems caused by unemployment. (And that's the thing, is unemployment is not the actual problem, it is a cause of problems, but AGI would give us easy alternatives to the fundamentally unattainable goal of full employment.)
I still think there is a contradiction he glossed over. In a capitalist society, jobs have a dual role that is sometimes paradox: For workers and employees, jobs are a source of income, skill, status and participation; for the (capitalist) state, a job is often a justification why the worker deserves to exist. But for the employer, jobs are a cost center and expenditure that should be minimized - that was why this tech was developed in the first place.
The state papers over that contradiction with the idea of perpetual economic growth, where the economic activity simply grows so fast that more jobs are created than are lost by efficiency improvements.
Gates is somehow expecting that "we" (whoever that is) agree just like that to keep certain jobs from being replaced by AI, even if they could. But that would go against all the forced and incentives that make up the dynamic of the current system.
There are two purposes to jobs:
One is the obvious one, to produce things. AI can somewhat help with that, although less than you might think because it's largely producing knowledge output rather than physical things. If AI lets one knowledge worker do the work of 10, the effect of that is to free up 9 knowledge workers to take up manual labor, it's not to make manual laborers 10x more productive.
The second purpose is to distract people from attempting to work on their own interests and instead corral them into working for others'. You see examples of this in the form of acquihires (where they obviously don't need you to do the work, they already have a competing product, but they do need to take your product off the market), and in bullshit jobs, and in think tanks and consulting firms and legal machinery. It's a form of social control and a means to maintain social order, not a requirement for actual productivity. When you don't give people a job to do, they start working for their own interests, and their own interests frequently conflict with others. And we've seen that over and over again: the Great Depression nearly led to a fascist coup in the U.S. [1] and did result in fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain, and large communist movements in France and China. The COVID pandemic and subsequent lockdowns led to widespread protests and civil unrest in the U.S. and other countries.
Popular discourse concentrates almost exclusively on the first purpose, because the second one is icky to talk about. In reality most people are individually better off being independently wealthy and not working, but society can only absorb so many free agents with their own ideas and wills to power. (This is also why retirement and stay-at-home parenting are broadly institutionalized: it's okay for people to not work when they no longer have the energy to work, it's only dangerous when people are not working and yet have the energy to do things other than working). But the second reason actually has more explanatory power. If you assume that the true reason for employment is to take people out of the competitive will-to-power market, lots and lots of irrational moves suddenly make sense, like high-paid executives, bullshit jobs, bureaucratic incompetence, projects where billions are invested and then the whole thing is canceled, competing internal divisions, people not getting fired for doing nothing, etc. The whole point is for them to do nothing.
There's a Chesterton's Fence [2] issue at work here. Many people, particularly young people, grow up with the first explanation for work and take it at face value, and then a new technology comes around that saves all this work and they're like "Of course this is a good idea! I want to be part of it!" But if the actual purpose of work is to distract people from pursuing their own interests, this is incredibly dangerous. The actual consequence is going to be widespread unrest and quite possibly war.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
[2] https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
Gates is worth about $100B, Elon Musk about $850B. Let's call it $1T altogether. That would be at most about $115 per human on Earth (~8.5B humans). Not sure that is sufficient to "end hunger and homelessness."
Your calculation only makes sense if every one of those 8.5B humans is suffering from hunger and homelessness. Somewhere around 1 in 1000 people are homeless (https://worldmetrics.org/global-homelessness-statistics/), and 1 in 12 or so has experienced "hunger" some time in the past year (https://www.fao.org/hunger/en/). Obviously the numbers depend on how you define "homelessness" and "hunger", but in any case this multiplies the $ that could be used to help individuals by those factors. Between $1000 (hunger) and $115,000 (homelessness) may not sound like a lot, but when your yearly income is around $1000, it can mean a lot.
It’s not like giving that money to people is the only option. you can spend it in projects that produce food, build low cost houses, etc.
let's set aside for a second the fact that this is not how things work, but you are off by an order of magnitude
EDIT: parent comment was edited: it used to say $15
1 trillion divided by 8.5 billion is $117. Global GDP is around $126T, so accumulated wealth of less than 1% of global GDP can barely move the needle.
> you are off by an order of magnitude
On which figure?
Not sure which number you're questioning, but it all looks right to me:
$852.7B[0] + $109.9B[0] = $962.6B ~= $1T ($1,000,000,000,000)
World population ~= 8.3B (8,300,000,000)[1]
$1,000,000,000,000 / 8,300,000,000 people = $120.481927711 per person[2]
[0] https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=%241%2C000%2C000%2C000%2C000...
That not even enough for DoorDash in Seattle.
Does anyone else feel incredibly nostalgic for the time when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were the richest people on earth? I remember feeling pretty good about the fact that they were trying to do so much good, and about the giving pledge. Things feel so different now.
Few people were more vicious than Gates when he was running Microsoft. Maybe Larry Ellison but Gates was smarter and more cunning. I don't feel nostalgic about those days and Gates is just trying to buy his way into heaven and a positive view on his wikipedia page.
When that was a thing, I could never forgive Bill for Windows ME.
But, where would you like to go today?
No because Bill Gates was hanging out with Jeffery Epstein that entire time. I also feel like people forgot his insanely evil business practices from the 80s and 90s? Bill Gates has always been one of the worst people out there. Every bit as bad as Musk. It's a big club, we're just not in it.
It’s not that big of a club actually only about 100,000 people max
Carlin is God but that quote doesn’t actually make a lot of sense
All of this is truly bizarre, I hope that we can make sense of this craze in the future.
Maybe it will be seen similarly to the dancing crazes of the Middle Ages.
I think it will be seen similar to the crypto craze to be honest. People on this very site, with an actual reputation, were telling us non stop how we were losers who were going to be left behind and stay poor. They never had to apologize for being obnoxious when that didn’t happen
Comparing AI to crypto makes zero sense. We get tremendous use from AI right now, while 2 decades after invention of crypto there are still basically zero legitimate use cases. I repeat - the utility of AI is not some hypothetical but something that happens right now at very large scale (so please don't reply with something in line "well, crypto was supposed to have lots of uses also").
> while 2 decades after invention of crypto there are still basically zero legitimate use cases.
The first card on the homepage of the DTCC (https://www.dtcc.com/) is "Tokenization". This is a legitimate use case and is being adopted at the largest institutional level. Stablecoins are yet another legitimate use case.
Edit: for what it's worth, I do agree that the crypto craze was insane. I also think the AI craze is insane, even though I agree that its current proliferation is larger than crypto.
Ok, there are niche use cases but still - nothing world changing and real world adoption remains very low.
That’s irrelevant… I’m talking about the craze, not the technology
But that doesn't make sense. How can you evaluate if craze is warranted without evaluating underlying technology?
where? All i see is getting bugged with slop and for learning i returned to textbooks. Even code i get from it is stuff i would earlier copy paste from SO.
After 2 years i feel mostly distracted by it. There are usecases ofc but encountering a chatbot or AI written posts, software, etc. is still a negative.
Literally everywhere. I'm running a scientific project where I've got to inspect large amount of whole-body MRI segmentations. The software available on market is very clunky for doing that, so I've asked Claude to write one perfectly tailored for my use case. With all the helper functions I've asked it to implement, the software sped up reviews >4x. And I couldn't write it myself.
I agree there are usecases, but image classification is not the hype. Still - that's great, can we get a link? Or let me guess it's internal, you don't want to doxx yourself?
Knowing medical software requirements, which might be there for a reason, i highly doubt this will see production.
> I agree there are usecases, but image classification is not the hype. Still - that's great, can we get a link? Or let me guess it's internal, you don't want to doxx yourself?
Why would I distribute software that's tailor made for me? I don't want to deal with headaches associated with distributing it.
> Knowing medical software requirements, which might be there for a reason, i highly doubt this will see production.
It won't, the software is not a point of my work, it's just a tool for my actual project which has nothing to do with programming (very useful tool but still - not a goal on it's own).
Or maybe it's not just a craze and we'll soon look back and think "I wonder what we might've done differently if we'd been clear-eyed about what was happening."
Show me a person who truly revised their priors to put forward a novel solution to AI that isn't just "do the thing that I like and that benefits me in some way". The discourse around all this is a mix of quasi-religious beliefs (pro and con) and blatant opportunism. For Dario and Sam, the solution is "give us a monopoly on this tech". For Gates, it's "create an supranational organization with unprecedented taxation and regulatory powers" - world AI police, presumably staffed by technocrats like him.
What's your take? Do the ideas put forward by Gates strike you as worth pursuing? What are the trade-offs - how can they go wrong?
https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/ https://ai-2040.com
Can you describe a method of slowing frontier AI development that you yourself would not classify as monopoly-seeking by US AI companies or power-seeking by governments and technocrats?
Limiting the development of powerful AI requires restricting free enterprise in some way, backed by the threat of force; hence, there will always be a cynical framing available.
In the case of the US AI industry, how about some stricter banking laws to forbid its current circular financing?
> Do the ideas put forward by Gates strike you as worth pursuing? What are the trade-offs - how can they go wrong?
I agree. However, why aren’t we applying the same standard to AI technologies themselves? That doesn’t strike me as worth pursuing, the article discusses all the ways that is and will go wrong
Unless there's another significant breakthrough, LLMs will only get incremental improvements.
Do they need more than incremental breakthroughs to transform society?
They don’t even need breakthrough, it’s already damaging to societies
I could google this, but what are these dancing crazes?
I feel this is merely stating the obvious.
It goes back to the industrial revolution and every revolution before and after. There was a point where they thought a majority of people would be working as switchboard operators and then telephone switching came along. Horses to cars, etc.
Jobs transition, new space is created, people are caught in tbe crossfire of supply and demand curves. Incan agree the bullwhip of this one is going to be aggressive.
I think it is a mistake to bet on AI as a driver of meaningful growth in a commercial capacity in the current state. When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium.
I think the world at large is "learning on the job" what data scientists and others in ai have known for a long, several decades long, time have already known.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49450672, meet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451313
Love how Gates and Nadella had nothing to say until this year, after they clearly lost any hope of building a moat around it
You have to understand that Gates had other distractions to deal with
Never let a good crisis go to waste, billg.
> I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots.
You had me here.
I immediately closed the page after I saw who wrote the article. Sory Bill, I pass.
yep, lets listen to a pedophile, he will surely have words of wisdom for us. - Euroturds
billg: "kaczynski was right afterall"
Dunno what's going on with these urls;
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49448137
This is the person behind such products as Windows and Copilot. I honestly don't trust a single word he says.
But Bill stopped being involved in Microsoft’s day to day business over a decade ago. And he’s making valid arguments that don’t require us to trust him. Do you not think labor disruption, cyberattacks, and mass surveillance are big risks from powerful AI?
>The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history. Right now, we are not preparing adequately for that transition. If the world takes the right steps, AI will be a force for good and leave everyone better off.
It will be a force for good. But like all evolutionary steps the path to good will be paved with darkness.
The very existence of humanity and life itself rests on the foundation of natural selection. Humanity will be better, it will get better but before we get there... there will be a culling.
It's an unfortunate truth. We all might be culled.
Is it me or does it read like pure satire?
An AI ministry, “human-reserved” jobs, and taxes on AI tokens.
Sandbags against a tsunami. When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out?
What we need is deep thinking on the implications and make the default way forward one where we want to go. In other words, we build a channel for the flood waters, not a wall. Creating a role for "somebody to deal with AI issues" is one of those hand-wavvy upper management moves that looks defensible but simply passes the buck to someone who structurally lacks the agency to actual move the needle.
> When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out?
the only thing i can think of was when that Chinese scientist produced gene edited human babies. He was pretty much excommunicated from the scientific community and, eventually, spent some time in jail.
AI, on the other hand, has a huge profit potential and way too far out of the bag to go back in. To quote the movie Terminator, "it will never stop".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair
What surprises me even more is why Bill Gates writes this kind of bizarre, low-quality nonsense in the first place. What purpose does it serve? It’s so obviously shallow that it influences nothing and adds nothing to the conversation.
Locally, yes, like the Japanese shogunate blocking the outside world for more than two hundred years.
Globally, it is unrealistic.
You aren't alone surely
It reads like somebody got AI psychosis.
"A lot of people are skeptical of AI because it makes mistakes. But what's going to happen when it stops making mistakes??? It'll change the world!"
Honestly I suspect he's probably just cynically talking his book. All of this "AI is scary good / it'll be even scarier gooder soon" is no less advertising than slapping a cigarette logo on a racing car.
AI are improving their capacity at blazingly fast rate. Is noticing that AI psychosis? I'd say that believing that we are at the peak of LLM capabilities is some kind of psychosis due to large dose copium inhalation.
dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49448137
I've tried to type this up a couple times, each time backing out because at the end of the day, I really don't give a rats fart about anything Gates has to say. I just wish he would disappear.
640k ought be enough for this AI. I'm not sure takes like these are helpful. It's widely acknowledged that this is a technological shift, like electricity, like industrialization, etc. It could be (good or bad) but most likely (good AND bad). Does anyone really believe, sincerely, that AI will be the great equalizer? It's a hilarious proposition. They are working their hardest to make sure that its not imo.
I'm sorry. I absolutely do not trust Bill Gates. His history of ruthless, cutthroat tactics in the 90s is not easily forgotten and when he proposes things like international organizations to audit everyone's AI[1] I can't help but question his motives.
I also don't understand what gives him the moral standing to propose a solution at all. He's not the fucking pope but a ruthless tech businessman with vested financial interest in the technology involved. He should stick to his lane.
[1] > But even a country that gets its own house in order will still be exposed to risks that cross borders. This is why an international organization will need to be built in parallel.
> It will be unlike any other institution we have ever created, though it can follow the model of some existing systems. There’s an inspections regime for nuclear weapons, regulations for international aviation, and agreements that protect the ozone layer. A new global organization for AI will need elements of all three and more.
> ruthless tech businessman with vested financial interest in the technology involved
Isn't that past-tense? What's his financial interest these days? He still owns a small amount of MSFT, but he doesn't exactly have control over the corporation any more. I imagine Nadella always answers his calls, but I'd bet most CEOs will make time to take a call from Bill.
> He's not the fucking pope
No, but he did link to the Pope in this very essay.
Pope Leo XIV, "On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence":
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...
Interesting that you chose the pope as a positive control. I'd say that taken the whole history of papacy into question, there is no particular reason to trust the pope either.
If you’re one of the people wondering why there’s an enormous backlash to AI, here’s your answer: “this thing we’re building is going to he fucking terrible and ruin your life. Please give us all your money to build it.”
It’s exactly the same set of questions and challenges as with nuclear power
Nuclear power is one of the most amazing magical things on the planet but nuclear weapons present a massive challenge to social coordination. So maybe we should sit as a society and try to figure out how to manage that instead of just freak out and burn all of our own faces off because we can’t handle complex conversations.
Why is that so hard to grasp?
No? Nuclear never had those massive valuations. Did not hyped itself this ridiculous way. Was not forced down on everyone. And the vision of nuclear power was not "make humans obsolete".
We did not had nuclearmaxxing. We did not had doomtrolling from nuclear companies.
They did in fact put radioactive elements in everyday objects back when it was first discovered. Wikipedia has a whole page of "radioactive quackery."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_quackery
While nuclear power is not intrinsically anti human you can't really separate the public perception of nuclear power and that of nuclear weapons. Anti nuclear sentiment is a lot easier to understand when you realize everyone who grew up under the Cold War had went through nuclear attack drills.
I’m not sure what to say other than you’re entirely incorrect about all of that
In fact you could probably make a strong case that the US and USSR did NuclearMaxxx
It’s called the nuclear arms race/cold war and was the defining characteristic of society post WWII until 9/11
> It’s exactly the same set of questions and challenges as with nuclear power
I'm not sure "provide cheap and plentiful power that may be risky if not managed correctly" is really on the same level as "replace all human labor we possibly can"
I agree with you that ideally we would coordinate and cooperate better, but the sad problem (the prisoner's dilemma, really) is that some (many? most? all?) people will not coordinate or cooperate no matter what, especially if they have an opportunity to get ahead by not cooperating. As long as people like that exist we have to find ways to work with them or work around them
It doesn't help that people with the most wealth seem like they mostly have that sort of personality
Taxing AI tokens will only lead to the acceleration of local LLMs, to produce tax-free tokens.
We must tax lines of code. Like property tax, but for code. Every year, companies (and individuals) must declare all repos. Have them appraised.
"Taxing AI tokens will only lead to the acceleration of local LLMs"
This part was a good point, so I couldn't tell if the second part is satire or not.
All his good things (possibly help medicine! agriculture! government!) involve a belief in ever-increasing superintelligence and so much "hope" and optimimusm and may not ever exist.
All his negative things (increase of fraud, skill atrophy, cyberattacks, removing employment, consolidation of capital and wealth) exist currently now with AI as it is.
How long will negatives outweigh the positives? And will those positives ever actually come to fruition? How anyone (who is not a sociopath and expects to be one of those pyramid tops) can see a bright future is beyond my pessimism and sense of reality as it is now.
We should not be listening to a man who drugged his wife with Epstein supplied antibiotics after getting an STD (among many, many other bad things he's done).
https://www.btimesonline.com/articles/176578/20260201/epstei...
Moral absolutism to apply a 1-bit value judgment to a human being is a pretty sad way to have a worldview, friend.
Looking at the exceedingly long history of someone's immoral actions and deeds isn't a "1-bit value judgement". The guy literally teamed up with a pedophile pimp foreign spy to drug his wife. I'll pass on hearing his thoughts about literally anything.
It's up to us, the public, to defend our society from deteriorating. There's no reason to defend Epstein's billionaire friends, you have nothing to gain from that.
Yes, let's put copilot in every app on Windows, Azure & Office :-)
Bill Gates hasn't been at Microsoft for a long time now.
He is on the board.
Bill resigned from the board in 2020: https://news.microsoft.com/source/2020/03/13/microsoft-annou...
"In my second one, which I started full time in 2008, I am giving back the wealth I made at Microsoft with the goal of making the world a healthier, better educated, and more equitable place."
Like inventing waterless toilets when people just need access to clean water ?
The sad story is that we don't need innovation, we need better politics.
Oh and he could open source windows, that would make us more equitable for sure.