Time to Think About Our Future and Artificial Intelligence

Bill Gates recently published an article titled The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical. In the article, he expresses his concerns about the long-term impact of AI in society. He also proposes possible solutions or approaches.

According to Gates, there are three big risks of the transition to AI:

• Many jobs will disappear forever. Unlike the industrial revolution, this time it’s not manual labor that’s being replaced but knowledge work.
• AI will empower people (and perhaps AIs) to do more harm. The same technology that will enable us to do great things can be used for doing wrong ones.
• AI could stunt our kids’ development and replace human relationships.

I found myself agreeing with many of Gates’ reflections. For example:

It is great that some AI companies are proposing solutions to challenges raised by their own technology, but we should not expect them to lead the charge. Some of the issues are outside their area of expertise, and in a democratic society it’s not their role to decide these things.

Instead, solutions should be developed through a public democratic process that includes elected officials, policymakers, educators, health workers, local officials, and community leaders. Millions of people will have their lives disrupted, and we’ll need a stronger, more flexible social safety net to help them manage the transition. Local communities are already raising concerns about the energy and water needed for data centers. Without solutions, some groups will push for stopping AI development and deployment altogether.

The solutions should be shaped by our answers to the profound questions raised by AI, including how we preserve our humanity in a time when machines can out-think us. As people who spend their lives thinking about what it means to be human, religious leaders can play a key role in this. I was fascinated by Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on AI, “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” It lays a strong foundation for the work that needs to be done.

Gates proposes three ideas for making sure that AI’s benefits outweigh possible harm:

• A domestic and international framework for dealing with AI. None of the current institutions are prepared to handle this fast-spreading technology.
• There are jobs meant to be done by humans. They should be declared Human Reserved. Those are jobs that could be replaced by AI, but the loss would be too great.
• We should rethink how we tax labor and capital. If the disruption he envisions happens, governments will need to provide a social safety net. But if jobs are replaced, people will be working less and paying less income taxes. Government revenues will drop. Gates proposed taxing AI tokens and robots. Right now, both can be written off as business expenses.

The article as a whole is interesting and thought-provoking. However, I think it’s too early for enacting some of Gates’ proposals, like taxing tokens or robots. Most governments are not very efficient at directing tax revenue from taxes to specific objectives. Also, once a tax is in place, it’s very difficult to roll back.

That said, the reality is that the best time to have such discussions and explore both the consequences of AI and the remedies is today. We need a discussion where the main actors are not the frontier model companies, but the society as a whole.