The Interview: Bill Gates on AI risk, regulation and the "vacuum of US leadership"

Bill Gates (0:00)

This is ultra different than any technology that's come before, and it will change how invention gets done. It'll change life in a huge way. And that's even before the humanoid robots come in and bring the physical capabilities on top of the cognition capabilities.

Katie Prescott (0:24)

Hello, and welcome to the interview from Times Tech. I'm Katie Prescott.

Danny Fortson (0:28)

And I am Danny Fortson. And this week, we have got a pretty big guest, Bill Gates.

Katie Prescott (0:35)

Yeah, I mean, you can say that again. He's one of the world's leading technologists, one of the world's richest and most powerful people, worth $114 billion, if you must know. And he's been sounding the alarm on AI's potential dangers and the lack of controls to stop them.

Danny Fortson (0:51)

And he thinks AI is, quote unquote, ultra different from anything that's come before and that governments, universities and the rest of society just aren't keeping up.

Katie Prescott (1:01)

And we also, in this conversation, get into the risks to jobs, biosecurity, whether AI is a bubble, and why he doesn't think that the tech companies themselves should be expected to sort all of this out.

Danny Fortson (1:14)

But he is still hugely optimistic about what it could do for healthcare, for education, and some of the poorest people in the world. So let's get into it. And just a quick reminder, you can watch this episode and all of our episodes on YouTube.

Katie Prescott (1:31)

So here's our conversation with Bill Gates. Enjoy.

Well, look, there's a huge amount to talk about, and we want to get into the report, all of your very stark warnings that you've issued about AI, and many of the things that you talk about that crop up on our podcast. As you can imagine, week in, week out. But I just wanted to start by looking at the year just gone. You've experienced a huge amount of scrutiny because of your association with Jeffrey Epstein. And I wondered how that was affecting the work that you want to do, and what your reflections are on that.

Bill Gates (2:08)

I had about a dozen meetings. You know, I was trying to raise billions of dollars for global health, and I thought he could refer me to those people, and we could save millions of lives. In retrospect, that was not only a dead end, but a mistake in terms of the reputational risk, and we live in a very reputationally sensitive world.

I was able to make clear exactly what I was doing in terms of meeting with them, and very clear that that's all that ever happened there. So I've learned a lot of lessons over time. I wouldn't even say I had antitrust difficulties, I had a divorce, I'm heavily associated with the tech industry. Some things where people question me are things actually that didn't happen like views of vaccines tracking people or stuff like that. But I'm a lot more careful about who I or the foundation associate with now, and I put a lot of thought into that and doesn't change anything about what the foundation's about or the partners we're working with.

Danny Fortson (3:20)

Well, thank you for addressing that. And I think, to your point around this report, the world's in a really interesting spot right now. And as a report lays out, especially around AI, there's incredible potential, but also huge negatives and some pretty terrifying directions this can go.

Do you feel like we're in a window, right, after which it will be too late? Like we have to change course, we have to take action. So that's one question, it's two parts. The other question is, is like of all of the things that could go wrong, what is the thing that most worries you that rises above everything else as we think about the arrival of this technology?

Bill Gates (4:03)

Well, eventually when the technology gets super good, including being embodied in humanoid robots, perhaps more than 20 years from now, we'll have a world of abundance, where food and shelter are provided at either no or extremely low cost, because the robots, the materials, the invention of new medicines has just gone so far. And there will have challenges in terms of how we organize society and purpose, meaning things of that nature. That's far enough off and probably is best thought about by young people. And so a lot of what I'm addressing is this very tumultuous period, where AI is starting to affect jobs and creating cyber or bio or psychosocial risk or control risk that the last year, the AIs have gotten powerful enough that those risks are here now.