People are going to keep on losing their jobs to AI because “the incentive structure [in business] is wrong: It’s ‘hire the robot, fire the human and don’t look back’,” Bill Gates tells The Observer in an exclusive interview.
Describing the AI age as an “evolutionary event” where humans are no longer the most intelligent things on the planet, he forecasts wholesale disruption to the labour market as almost all work skills – “skills of invention, skills of white-collar work and then with humanoids, the skills of physical human labour” – are replaced by AI.
Governments will need to find new sources of income to fund the needs of people put out of work, future education and re-skilling: “The revenue for the safety net to help us through this transition will actually be reduced, even though overall prosperity gets better.” He wants to see taxes on AI use, perhaps in the form of a “token tax”.
He also says that billionaires should pay more tax. He says he would have been willing to pay “a little more than double” the tax he has paid – he has paid $14bn in tax in his lifetime, but would have been willing to pay $40bn. “Governments [need to] figure out how to tax very wealthy people in a way that feels fair. It doesn’t solve the fact that government spending versus government tax collection in many rich countries, including the US, is out of whack… that disparity’s gotten larger in the last few years. So at some point, more taxes will have to be raised, and some spending will have to be curbed.”
While keen to stress the “good stuff” that could be enabled by AI, such as enhanced drug discovery, Gates warned that technological advances will present a “real test of quality of government”, at a time when developed countries are already fire-fighting on multiple fronts and geopolitical tensions are high. “You could say this isn’t the best time to say, hey, rich countries, let’s do the hardest thing you’ve ever done,” he said.
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The philanthropist and Microsoft founder highlighted bioterrorism and cyberattacks as the most pressing short-term threats, but that, by the end of the 2020s, artificial intelligence could be operating beyond human control. Within three to four years, he says, “you hope that you’ve gotten very serious about the alignment control issues”, i.e. the risk of AIs operating in ways that no longer align with human interests.
The UK is perhaps better placed than most: its regulatory framework and state capacity on AI have been praised internationally and by industry insiders. Ahead of a budget that is expected to stress the importance of “resilience”, the chancellor made a flurry of AI-related spending announcements aiming to build on this strong start. There were two major themes: protecting Britain against emerging threats – including those highlighted by Gates – and promoting domestic innovation to avoid reliance on technologies developed overseas.
The US and China will, on a few of these issues, have to view [AI] as a challenge to humanity, not a nation-state win-lose type situation
The US and China will, on a few of these issues, have to view [AI] as a challenge to humanity, not a nation-state win-lose type situation
Bill Gates
The government yesterday announced £100m of funding for a new AI Biosecurity Lab, the world’s first, with responsibility for monitoring biological threats and developing medical countermeasures. The lab will be supported by up to £200m of model credits from Anthropic and OpenAI.
The AI Security Institute, the UK’s internationally admired agency responsible for testing the capabilities of AI models, will receive a further £120m of funding. An additional £60m will go towards a National Cyber Shield, £70m towards a new National Exposure and Real-Time Vulnerability (Nerv) Centre, and £23m towards the government’s new AI Economics Institute, which is chaired by Nobel prize winner Simon Johnson and tasked with analysing the emerging economic impacts of AI.
In keeping with the government’s interventionist inclinations, and its willingness to use the public sector balance sheet to “pick winners”, the UK’s Sovereign AI fund has also been backed with £120m of new funding, an increase of around 25%. Half will go towards direct investments in promising UK AI companies, and half towards an R&D procurement scheme, to foster innovative solutions in areas like cybersecurity and healthcare.
Kanishka Narayan, the minister for AI, has spoken repeatedly of the importance of the UK having strategic leverage over AI technology. That wouldn’t mean the UK duplicating all parts of the AI supply chain, but instead the pursuit of a small number of globally leading capabilities that other countries would struggle to manage without. A non-exclusive set of candidates include a global role for the AI Security Institute in safety evaluations, domestic computing capacity and expertise in chip design.
So-called “middle powers” like the UK are trying to pick a path through a world dominated by two AI superpowers. Gates warned in his interview that co-operation between those superpowers will be required to avert the AI-related risks that are causing so much worry inside the leading labs. “The US and China will, on a few of these issues, have to view it as a challenge to humanity, not a nation-state win-lose type situation.” he said.
Gates also spoke to The Observer of his regret over his links with the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, which were the subject of a US Congressional committee hearing in June. “It definitely was a damaging thing to have spent time with him,” he said, adding that he has “lots of things where I look back and I say, okay, I hope what I learned from that is better than whatever pain or problems that it caused”.
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