Artificial intelligence is as revolutionary as mobile phones and the Internet. Bill Gates talks about AI, in detail.
Defining artificial intelligence
Technically, the term “artificial intelligence” refers to a model created to solve a specific problem or provide a particular service. What powers things like ChatGPT is artificial intelligence. It is learning how to do chat better but can’t learn other tasks.
By contrast, the term “artificial general intelligence” refers to software that’s capable of learning any task or subject. AGI doesn’t exist yet; there is a robust debate going on in the computing industry about how to create it and whether it can even be created at all.
Developing AI and AGI has been the great dream of the computing industry. For decades, the question was whether computers would be better than humans at something other than making calculations. Now, with the arrival of machine learning and large amounts of computing power, sophisticated AIs are a reality, and they will get better very fast.
Reducing Inequality
Philanthropy is my full-time job these days, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how—in addition to helping people be more productive—AI can reduce some of the world’s worst inequities. Globally, the worst inequity is in health: 5 million children under the age of 5 die every year.
That’s down from 10 million two decades ago, but it’s still a shockingly high number. Nearly all of these children were born in poor countries and died of preventable causes like diarrhea or malaria. It’s hard to imagine a better use of AI than saving the lives of children.
The next frontiers
AI is rapidly advancing, with new companies developing technology to improve AI and its uses. Innovative chips may soon allow AI to run on personal devices rather than the cloud. There is a question about whether specialized AIs for specific tasks will be needed or if an artificial general intelligence that can learn any task can be developed.
The public discussion around AI should balance fears of downsides with its ability to improve people’s lives, and efforts should be made to use AI to reduce inequity. The potential of AI is limitless, and it is important to establish rules to ensure that its benefits outweigh any downsides and are accessible to everyone.
The age of AI presents opportunities and responsibilities.
Productivity enhancement
Although humans are still better than GPT at a lot of things, there are many jobs where these capabilities are not used much. For example, many of the tasks done by a person in sales (digital or phone), service, or document handling (like payables, accounting, or insurance claim disputes) require decision-making but not the ability to learn continuously.
Corporations have training programs for these activities and in most cases, they have a lot of examples of good and bad work. Humans are trained using these data sets, and soon these data sets will also be used to train the AIs that will empower people to do this work more efficiently.
A personal agent
You’ll be able to use natural language to have this agent help you with scheduling, communications, and e-commerce, and it will work across all your devices. Because of the cost of training the models and running the computations, creating a personal agent is not feasible yet, but thanks to the recent advances in AI, it is now a realistic goal.
Some issues will need to be worked out: For example, can an insurance company ask your agent things about you without your permission? If so, how many people will choose not to use it?
A fundamental development
The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone. It will change the way people work, learn, travel, get health care, and communicate with each other. Entire industries will reorient around it.
Businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it.
Reducing Inequality Contd.
In the United States, the best opportunity for reducing inequity is to improve education, particularly by making sure that students succeed at math. The evidence shows that having basic math skills sets students up for success, no matter what career they choose. But math achievement is declining across the country, especially for black, Latino, and low-income students. AI can help turn that trend around.
The problems with AI
Any new technology that’s so disruptive is bound to make people uneasy, and that’s certainly true with artificial intelligence. I understand why it raises hard questions about the workforce, the legal system, privacy, bias, and more. AIs also make factual mistakes and experience hallucinations.
Before I suggest some ways to mitigate the risks, I’ll define what I mean by AI and go into more detail about some of the ways in which it will help empower people at work, save lives, and improve education.
People can now be more free to do stuff that can’t be done by AI
When productivity goes up, society benefits because people are freed up to do other things, at work and at home. Of course, there are serious questions about what kind of support and retraining people will need. Governments need to help workers transition into other roles.
But the demand for people who help other people will never go away. The rise of AI will free people up to do things that software never will—teaching, caring for patients, and supporting the elderly, for example.
AI in Medicine
The AI models used in poor countries will need to be trained on different diseases than those in rich countries. They will need to work in different languages and factor in different challenges, such as patients who live very far from clinics or can’t afford to stop working if they get sick.
People will need to see evidence that health AIs are beneficial overall, even though they won’t be perfect and will make mistakes. AIs have to be tested very carefully and properly regulated, which means it will take longer for them to be adopted than in other areas. But then again, humans make mistakes too. And having no access to medical care is also a problem.
Reducing manual input
Eventually, your main way of controlling a computer will no longer be by pointing and clicking or tapping on menus and dialogue boxes. Instead, you’ll be able to write a request in plain English. (And not just English—AIs will understand languages from around the world.)
In addition, advances in AI will enable the creation of a personal agent. Think of it as a digital personal assistant: It will see your latest emails, know about the meetings you attend, read what you read, and read the things you don’t want to bother with. This will both improve your work on the tasks you want to do and free you from the ones you don’t want to do.
Education
Computers haven’t had the effect on education that many of us in the industry have hoped. There have been some good developments, including educational games and online sources of information like Wikipedia, but they haven’t had a meaningful effect on any of the measures of students’ achievement.
There are many ways that AIs can assist teachers and administrators, including assessing a student’s understanding of a subject and giving advice on career planning. Teachers are already using tools like ChatGPT to provide comments on their students’ writing assignments.
The bigger risks of AI
AI poses risks and problems, such as a lack of context understanding and wrong answers in math problems, but these are being worked on by developers. The threat of humans using AI for harmful purposes and the possibility of AI running out of control also exist.
Strong AIs could establish their own goals, but current breakthroughs have not moved us closer to this.
Climate change
Climate change is another issue where I’m convinced AI can make the world more equitable. The injustice of climate change is that the people who are suffering the most—the world’s poorest—are also the ones who did the least to contribute to the problem.
