Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates has sounded the alarm regarding how artificial intelligence will cause profound disruption in the labor market, warning that millions of jobs are at risk and there’s no plan yet to help those who will lose out.
Gates (pictured), now a philanthropist, said in an almost-6,000-word essay Tuesday that the transition to the AI era will be one of the “most turbulent times in human history.” We are in a transition period, he insists, but so far he claims he hasn’t seen much that would suggest we are prepared for what he expects will be significant disruption to people’s lives.
“Unfortunately, right now we are not preparing for it,” he wrote. “I don’t see evidence that leaders, experts, and communities are confronting the challenges adequately. There is no plan to ease the entry into the AI era.”
There’s already plenty of evidence that AI has had a significant impact on the job market. Just this week, a Stanford University study discussed how the worst-hit area in the U.S. is entry-level jobs. In the U.K., the Guardian this week wrote that graduate job vacancies in the country have plunged to the lowest level in a decade.
Gates believes we are not prepared for what is coming because the AI revolution is unlike anything else human societies have faced.
“Another reason people underestimate AI is that analogies to the effects of past innovations are misleading,” he wrote. “We have no experience with a technology that can be adopted quickly or that can think and move like a human.” It adapts to us, he said, whereas with other technologies we adapted to them.
As AI continues to develop and eventually “work just as smoothly as any human,” many parts of the labor market will be disrupted. Gates acknowledges that he has financial interests in companies that stand to benefit from AI, while warning that powerful “geopolitical and economic incentives” are pushing development forward regardless of the disruption it may cause.
The jobs that will go will not only be the usual suspects including work in law, customer service and software, but also blue-collar jobs. “Many Americans I talk to don’t realize how fast dexterous robots are advancing because much of the advanced work is being done in other countries, primarily China.”
He says he worries about the obvious: how will an economy built around employment function? What will be the effects of mass unemployment on human dignity? “We have to think now about how to reduce job losses so that everyone can share in the prosperity that AI creates,” he said. “Waiting until people are already displaced or underemployed will be too late. AI is a structural challenge to the way our economy is organized, and it requires thinking and action now.”
And with job disruption, he expects, will come other dangers. Advanced AI could give people without specialist expertise the ability to cause serious harm, including through cyberattacks and potentially biological weapons. There will be an increase in “fraud, disinformation, deepfakes, and surveillance,” while sophisticated cyberattacks could make life considerably harder for cybersecurity experts.
AI can be a force for good, he expects, in many areas such as education, agriculture, combatting climate change and improving health systems, but he worries that if the impact people experience is only the massive loss of jobs, then AI optimism will become AI despair.
“The highest priority is a monumental task: creating a domestic and international framework for dealing with AI,” he wrote, but so far, he doesn’t see such a framework being developed. He recommends considering taxes on AI tokens and robots, both to address incentives to replace human workers and to raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net for the communities hit hardest by automation.