Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates is deeply concerned about the potential of Artificial Intelligence to be used in unethical and society-shaking ways — but Gates, using history as a guide, finds reasons to believe A.I. will provide at least as much help as hindrance.
Gates says we have been here before — in a moment where disruptive technology promises an impact so seminal it makes the world a different place. The advent of automobiles, personal computers, and the internet all caused disruptive shifts in the world and yet, Gates says, these transformative technologies didn’t destroy humanity. (Gates does admit that A.I.’s impact may ultimately be greater than any of those innovations that preceded it.)
The risks of AI are real, and they can seem overwhelming—but the best reason to believe we can manage them is that we’ve done it before. History shows it’s possible to solve challenges created by new technologies, and if governments and the private sector do their parts, we can…
— Bill Gates (@BillGates) July 11, 2023
Gates, in his essay, leaves for another day the prospect of a “Super A.I.” that vies with humans for earthly supremacy, a real notion that remains mercifully in the future. Instead, Gates deals with the impacts of A.I. in its present form and addresses its potential for destruction.
The number one target of those who would use A.I. for unethical advantage is by consensus the destruction of democracy, one method of which is the corruption of elections. As has been shown recently, A.I. isn’t necessary to cast doubt on an election’s outcome, but the tools A.I. offers to those who wish to unfairly influence elections are scary and formidable.
Deepfakes, Gates acknowledges, could have an immediate and devastating effect on elections, on the premise that, as the saying goes, “a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth puts its boots on.”
Yet Gates presents both a technology solution and a human solution for the deepfake problem, both of which make him “hopeful.” The human solution is adaptation: Gates asserts that as deepfakes proliferate, humans will get better at recognizing them and ignoring them, just the way he says we have largely done with scam emails asking for money. “We’ll need,” Gates says, “to build the same muscle for deepfakes.”
Otherwise, Gates implies, democracy is a sitting duck in A.I.’s crosshairs.
Since some are better at muscle development than others, a greater hope, perhaps, lies in technology’s ability to identify the fakes — that is, in A.I.’s ability to detect the work of A.I. for us. Gates links out to the deepfake detector developed by the chip giant Intel as evidence that what A.I. taketh away (our sure sense of reality), it also giveth.
Gates believes there are “more reasons than not to be optimistic that we can manage the risks of AI while maximizing their benefits.” But, he warns, “we need to move fast.” Partisanship won’t work, because government needs to work together to acquire the expertise and knowledge to legislate.
Beginning with deepfakes, Gates writes: “The law needs to be clear about which uses of deepfakes are legal and about how deepfakes should be labeled so everyone understands when something they’re seeing or hearing is not genuine.”
If only such technology and legal restraint could be applied to the fake information people see and hear that isn’t computer-generated.
