Bill Gates has spent years warning that the biggest threats to humanity don’t always arrive with a warning siren. In 2015, it was a pandemic. Now, the Microsoft co-founder is pointing at artificial intelligence, saying the technology could give people with malicious intentions the ability to cause destruction on a scale never seen before.
“AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths,” Gates said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” excerpts of which were released Sept. 25 ahead of the interview’s Sept. 27 broadcast.
“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,” Gates added.
The warning isn’t simply about AI becoming smarter. Gates is focused on what happens when increasingly capable systems are placed in the hands of people who want to cause harm.
He also argued that technology companies shouldn’t be left to police themselves.
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“You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,” Gates said. “And that has to be a required thing.”
Gates Has Been Warning About Catastrophic Risks for Years
The AI warning has a familiar rhythm.
On March 18, 2015, Gates delivered his widely viewed TED Talk, “The Next Outbreak? We’re Not Ready.” He argued that if something killed more than 10 million people in the coming decades, it was more likely to be a highly infectious virus than a war.
Nearly two years later, on Feb. 17, 2017, Gates took the pandemic warning to the Munich Security Conference. He said the next epidemic could emerge through genetic engineering and warned that a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year. He said experts believed there was a reasonable probability of such an outbreak within 10 to 15 years.
Then, on April 27, 2018, Gates again warned that the world was poorly prepared for a modern pandemic. In his New England Journal of Medicine Shattuck Lecture, published May 30, he said there was a “significant probability” of a large and lethal pandemic occurring during his lifetime.
Covid-19 began spreading globally less than two years later.
That history doesn’t mean Gates predicted Covid-19 specifically. His warnings were about the broader risk of a devastating pandemic and the lack of preparedness.
AI Has Become The New Warning
Gates’ focus has increasingly shifted toward artificial intelligence.
In an essay published Aug. 26, Gates described the emerging AI era as “one of the most turbulent times in human history” and argued that the world needs a plan to make sure the benefits of AI outweigh its risks. He wrote that, at the current pace, there was a “very high chance of a net negative outcome.”
His Sept. 25 comments put a sharper edge on that concern.
The danger Gates described isn’t necessarily an AI system independently deciding to wipe out humanity. It’s the combination of powerful AI tools and people willing to use them for destructive purposes.
That could include cyberattacks, attacks on critical infrastructure, biological threats, disinformation, or other forms of disruption. Gates has previously warned that increasingly capable AI could give bad actors new ways to target hospitals, financial institutions, power grids, and government systems.
The “billion deaths” figure is therefore less a prediction of what will happen than a statement about what Gates believes the technology is capable of enabling.
And that leaves the central issue where he put it—whether governments can establish safeguards before the technology becomes powerful enough that the consequences of getting it wrong are measured not in billions of dollars, but in billions of lives.
On the date of publication, Caleb Naysmith did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. For more information please view the Barchart Disclosure Policy here.