Bill Gates has a blog called Gates Notes. Who knew? Well, now the whole world knows, as he has just written an article titled “The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical.” It’s a thoughtful read.
In reverse order, he worries that AI could stunt children’s development and replace human relationships. This is potentially true, but maybe it’s one of the easier ones to manage. Maybe I say that as I don’t have children.
His second concern is that AI could empower people, and AI, to do more harm. This is a no-brainer, and we are already seeing it. The ability to create deep fake images and videos has huge potential for harm. AI-powered bots already flood our social media feeds. And, of course, AI is very good at hacking, as we saw recently with the OpenAI breakout that hacked Hugging Face. At the simplest level, anyone with a mobile phone can manipulate an image to add or remove people, as my teenage niece constantly does by removing her brother from family photos.
Gates’s biggest concern is about jobs — many of today’s jobs may disappear forever. Yes, we’ve seen technology cut jobs before: think candlemakers. Candles were once the main source of light after nightfall; today they’re a luxury item as most of the world has access to light through electricity.
But now it is the speed of change that makes everything different. When electricity was rolling out globally and putting candlemakers out of business, it happened unevenly across the world and at different speeds. Broadly, it was a slow-motion collapse rather than a sudden event.
AI is coming into our lives incredibly quickly.
The internet was a slow multi-decade rollout. I was on dial-up bulletin boards in the late 1980s (Beltel from Telkom). It was slow and cumbersome, but it was the internet. In the mid-1990s we saw the World Wide Web gain traction, with web browsers making the experience easier. By the early 2000s many people in developed countries had some access to the internet, usually at work and usually still slow. In the 2010s we started seeing wide access and decent speeds.
The point is it took decades from appearing on the horizon to becoming mainstream.
AI is happening in a very different way. ChatGPT arrived in November 2022. Less than four years later, I would argue that anybody with an internet connection has access to AI in some form. These days the vast majority of the planet’s population has internet access and, hence, AI.
AI’s relentless pace gives society very little time to adapt. Jobs are at real risk. And with widespread job losses, income tax revenue is at risk. Electric vehicles are already reducing tax receipts, as fuel is chock-full of tax. As people move to EVs, less money will go into fuel levies.
I wrote last week about how government debt is spiralling out of control and one solution is to raise taxes. But with AI potentially disrupting the workforce, perhaps lower tax revenue is more likely.
