Bill Gates, the tech evangelist and leftist billionaire who has suddenly changed his tune to focus on the dangers of AI, told NBC’s Meet the Press that artificial intelligence could kill on a scale never before possible.
NBC released excerpts Friday of Gates’s interview with Kristen Welker, set to air Sunday. In it, the Microsoft co-founder said, “AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths.”
Gates went further, describing the danger of AI falling into the wrong hands. “Even though it’s pretty hard to get to 100%, there’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools,” he told Welker.
The comments extend warnings Gates laid out in a memo and essay released in August. Breitbart News reported on his sudden change to support AI doomers last month:
Bill Gates, who transformed himself from a software tycoon into a leftist icon of environmentalism and health philanthropy, has now published an essay calling for an AI slowdown. This is a massive shift is a shift for a tech evangelist who has built his post-Microsoft career on faith in AI’s ability to fix hard problems. Gates said this is the first time in his life he wishes a new technology would advance more slowly.
“I’m surprised to feel this way,” Gates said. “I’ve never seen a problem that innovation can’t solve.”
Gates grouped his worries into three categories: safety threats such as AI-enabled hacking, biological weapons and fraud; job losses driven by AI and AI-powered robots; and risks to children, including stunted learning and damaged human relationships. Writing software code and enabling new kinds of cyberattacks are the two areas where he says AI has recently outpaced his own expectations. Asked about the latter, he used one word: “mind-blowing.”
Gates said governments and political parties need to set aside their differences and act now, before AI risks spiral out of control. His remarks come as tech industry leaders and government officials continue debating how to respond to fears of an AI-driven catastrophe.
Major players in AI are jockeying for position in the AI race, including attempts to control potential government regulation of the technology. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Hall predicted the current tone of the AI debate in February, when he laid out the left’s plan to weaponize AI concerns before the midterms:
The political playbook has three parts:
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Convince Americans that mass AI job loss is inevitable.
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Channel that fear and ennui into galvanizing support for Universal Basic Income (UBI) redistribution in the long-term.
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Co-opt populist concerns over AI data centers driving up electricity and water bills for everyday Americans in the short-term.
Breitbart News will continue to report on the tech elite’s shifting position on AI.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.