In a nearly 6000-word essay, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates argues that society needs a plan for AI and soon.
This technology transition, he argues, won’t be like previous ones:
Because [AI] can see, listen, speak, and reason and will eventually do physical work just as smoothly as any human, it will not just affect one sector. AI will take on work in law, customer service, medicine, software, and manufacturing. It will hit these industries rapidly, over the course of a decade rather than a few generations.
Even the transition from an economy dominated by agricultural work to one dominated by white-collar work doesn’t give us much precedent, since this happened much more slowly and didn’t involve technology that “can substitute for human cognition.”
Gates highlights three major risks he thinks society needs to understand in order to meet the moment. The first: widespread job loss; the second: empowering harm (which includes bioterrorism, cyberattacks, and AI systems themselves acting against human interests); and the third: stunting young people’s development socially, psychologically, and academically.
He also highlights some major benefits, including solving tough problems like climate change and food security, facilitating medical advancements, and poverty reduction through empowering low-income farmers with tailored agricultural advice.
If you’ve read other pieces on AI, this might sound pretty familiar. Gates’s take fits squarely within the “promise and peril” line of thinking: AI has the potential to do both incredible harm and incredible good, and we as a society get to choose which if we act in time.
That said, the essay is particularly notable for two reasons. The first is that Gates was previously an AI optimist, downplaying dangers like widespread job loss just three years ago. His change of heart (not just about jobs, but about the technology as a whole) is a big deal.
The second is that his piece goes a bit further than typical “promise and peril” takes. He calls out the world for having no plan, and strongly advocates for international governance and cooperation:
The highest priority is a monumental task: creating a domestic and international framework for dealing with AI ... 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 … some cooperation between the U.S. and China will be required.
We do not have the luxury of moving slowly. The place to start is with a process for building the right institutions before the disruption forces governments into crisis mode. National leaders should convene economists, technologists, labor experts, business leaders, and workers themselves regularly to identify where existing institutions are failing and what new authorities may be needed. Countries will need to learn from each other.
And the countries that host the leading AI developers and control critical parts of the supply chain should begin meeting now to set up shared norms, before competitive pressure makes it harder for them to cooperate.
I agree. I also applaud Gates’s plans, relayed in a Reuters interview, to meet with President Xi Jinping later this year to discuss globally restricting dangerous model releases and keeping tabs on AI’s bio abilities.
Where I disagree is what I interpret to be an overly simplistic (perhaps wishful) view of what it will take to “make sure that AI’s benefits outweigh the harm it causes.” This isn’t a straightforward situation where enough good on one side of the ledger can compensate for whatever sits on the other — the kind of simple utilitarian calculus where we just maximize the benefits and minimize the harms. Though Gates uses variants of exactly that phrasing, he also acknowledges that the good and bad are intertwined: “The same AI model that can find a flaw in software so a company can fix it can also help a criminal exploit it,” he writes, and “Although AI will lead to lifesaving advances in drugs and vaccines, it will also make it easier to design a deadly new disease ... the positive capabilities are hard to separate from the dangerous ones.” So I’m confused by the implied simplicity.
How can we, for example, minimize the risk that “as the models become more powerful, they could begin to act against our interests and we could lose control”? As I discussed yesterday, we don’t currently know how to reliably control our existing AI systems, much less systems dramatically smarter than the humans trying to oversee them. This problem is not new, and years of research haven’t gotten society much closer to solving it. Slowing down the pace of development, or better yet, enacting an international ban on superintelligence such as the one proposed by MIRI’s technical governance team, seems like a common sense measure.
Gates writes,
If someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, I would likely support it.
To which I would reply: great, please use your influence to help make this happen!
Unfortunately, he follows with:
However, I don’t think that’s going to happen. The geopolitical and economic incentives are pushing too hard to go full speed ahead.
I disagree. Gates acknowledges elsewhere in the piece that “even a country that gets its own house in order will still be exposed to risks that cross borders” and comes out strongly in support of international cooperation to deal with AI. So we’re clearly already in the territory of recognizing that cooperation on AI should transcend geopolitical and economic incentives.
A slowdown also doesn’t seem as far-fetched as he makes it out to be. Less than a month ago, over a thousand employees of frontier AI companies signed a statement urging government to “support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.” A mutual slowdown isn’t far from the nuclear proliferation agreements that happened in a tense and competitive geopolitical environment during the Cold War, and some members of Congress have already begun comparing the risks from advanced AI to those posed by nuclear weapons.
What does seem far-fetched is that an international body will be able to enact a framework to get all the good parts of AI and none of the bad without the first step being a slowdown or halt. AI systems are improving extremely rapidly; government moves very slowly. Coming up with a framework for an incredibly difficult and complex task will take time, even in a world with the scientific understanding needed to address some of the most catastrophic risks. (Sadly, we don’t live in that world.)
AI systems are already starting to help with model development; this trend is expected to continue, and will likely kick off an even more rapid rise in capabilities than we’re already seeing. Even if an international framework managed to come up with a perfect plan, by the time it was drafted and enacted, the changed landscape would likely make it ineffective.
We need to stop development where it is if we’re to have any shot at the kind of framework Gates envisions. The task is difficult enough with today’s AI models; it will be nearly impossible if we go much further.
As Gates writes:
This unprecedented technology demands an unprecedented global response.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.