Bill Gates sounds alarm on AI-fueled mass unemployment, bioterrorism: Most dangerous tool ever invented

Bill Gates is warning that artificial intelligence could unleash mass unemployment, enable bioterrorism and even slip beyond human control — while accusing the tech industry of downplaying the dangers because too much money is at stake.The 70-year-old tech titan sounded an equally dire warning in a nearly 6,000-word essay published on his personal website.“Many jobs will disappear forever,” Gates wrote.He said AI will rapidly take on work in law, customer service, medicine, software and manufacturing — and predicted that while some new positions will be created, “without the right policies, there will be far fewer than exist today.”Gates even invoked the Great Depression, when unemployment in the US reached roughly 25% in 1933, while stopping short of predicting AI-driven joblessness would hit that level.“AI may not reach this level, but its impact will not go away with an economic cycle,” Gates wrote.Unlike earlier technological shifts, Gates argued, AI can replace human cognition itself — leaving fewer industries available to absorb workers displaced elsewhere.The biggest labor shock will come when AI can perform nearly error-free work without a human checking it, he wrote.At that point, companies will have every economic incentive to hand more work to machines, he said.“How will an economy that’s been built around employment operate if fewer people are working, or if many people are working fewer hours?” Gates wrote.Entry- and mid-level jobs face the most immediate threat, according to Gates.Gates predicted that increasingly capable “smart” robots will begin competing with humans on some physical tasks in construction and hospitality by the end of the decade.That could ignite an automation arms race in which companies that replace workers cut their prices, pressuring rivals to do the same.“Market forces will make adoption go faster and faster and, unless we intervene, there will be fewer good jobs available and the benefits will accr...