Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said Sunday that AI-led automation would be a net positive, freeing people to do more meaningful work, but also warned that the shift was happening too fast.
“When you improve productivity, it shouldn’t mean that if you get less productive, that’s bad. And if you get more productive, that’s good. It means you can free up these people to have smaller class size or have longer vacations or to help do more. The question is, if it comes so fast that you don’t have time to adjust to it,” the billionaire philanthropist said in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.
Gates’ remarks come amid growing concerns that rapid adoption of AI tools could displace large segments of the white-collar workforce. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has previously warned that approximately 50 per cent of white-collar, entry-level jobs will disappear by 2030 due to the adoption of AI.
Blue-collar jobs may not be safe either. “In parallel, when the robotic arms start to be decent, which they’re not today, will start to affect even larger classes of labour,” Gates said.
The interview also comes on the heels of a major announcement by President Donald Trump, whose White House administration unveiled its Silicon Valley-friendly plan to make the US a world leader in AI, primarily by rolling back regulations to promote innovation, except requiring tech companies to eliminate political bias in AI.
On the difference between AI and artificial general intelligence (AGI), he said, “people use very different definitions”. According to Gates, AGI will be achieved when AI tools can do “a telesales job or support job” in a way that is “cheaper and more accurate than humans are.”
He added that the rate at which AI was improving surprises him, especially with new features such as Deep Research capabilities. “I have an advantage that I have very smart people I can call up when I get confused about physics. But now I actually use deep research. And then I’ll send that answer to my smart friends and say, ‘Hey, did it get it right?’ And most of the time they’re like, ‘oh yeah, you didn’t need me’,” Gates said.
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Gates also said he is working with Microsoft and OpenAI to “make sure” that AI tools are released in low-income countries “to help with their health and education and agriculture.”
When asked about what advice he had for youngsters trying to navigate the challenging job environment in the AI era, Gates said, “The ability to use these tools is both fun and empowering. Embracing AI and tracking it will be very important. That doesn’t guarantee that we’re not going to have a lot of dislocation.”
“But I really haven’t changed my ‘be curious, read and use the latest tools’ recommendation for young people,” he added.
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