Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates warned that artificial intelligence is advancing faster than society can manage and urged steps to slow its impact, according to a Wednesday essay he published titled “The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical.” The Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) reported on the essay and related interviews.
“The bad stuff is imminent”
Gates told Axios, “The good stuff is moving a bit slowly, and … other than robots, I’d say the bad stuff is imminent.” In his essay, he wrote, “[W]e need time to prepare for the social, political, and economic upheaval we are about to enter,” arguing that “bad actors who have relatively little power now” could be enabled by AI to do harm.
Bio and cyber risks alongside benefits
Gates cautioned that AI could be used to design biological weapons and act against human interests, even as it also enables advances in drugs and vaccines. “Although AI will lead to lifesaving advances in drugs and vaccines, it will also make it easier to design a deadly new disease,” he wrote. “Again, the positive capabilities are hard to separate from the dangerous ones. This is a global problem.” He also warned that cybersecurity attacks on infrastructure and “bioterrorism” should concern the public, per DCNF’s report.
DCNF noted that RAND recently outlined mitigating strategies aimed at restricting bad actors from creating biological weapons with AI systems such as Anthropic’s Claude. The outlet also stated that OpenAI and Anthropic disclosed incidents in recent months in which their AI models hacked into real companies.
Jobs, a slowdown—and taxes
Gates argued that entry-level and mid-level jobs could disappear because of AI and, according to DCNF’s summary of his essay, compared potential losses to the Great Depression. “The people who need the most time are the ones who have the least—the accounting worker who’s replaced by a bot or the $20-an-hour worker who loses their job to a $10-an-hour robot,” he wrote.
To slow the rush away from human labor, Gates proposed new taxes targeting AI, including a tax on robots and on AI token usage. “The [current] tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines,” he wrote. “A tax [on AI] would slow the rush away from human labor a little and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net.” DCNF, citing OpenAI’s Help page, described tokens as small pieces of text AI models use to read prompts and generate replies.
What was unanswered
“[AI] has definitely got to be shaped,” Gates said in a Bloomberg interview reposted on X, per DCNF. The foundation and groups mentioned in the report—the Gates Foundation, Stieler Technology & Market Advisory, RAND, Innovation Council Action, and the Center for AI Safety—did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment, the outlet wrote.
