In an episode of his podcast “Unconfuse Me with Bill Gates”, the tech magnate also expressed his apprehensions about the new and rapidly improving technology “with no upper bound”.
“The idea that it achieves human levels on a lot of areas of work, even if it’s not doing unique science, it can do support calls and sales calls. I guess you and I do have some concern, along with this good thing, that it’ll force us to adapt faster than we’ve had to ever before,” Bill Gates said.
To this, Altman said that it is the scary part of the artificial intelligence.
“It’s not that we have to adapt. It’s not that humanity is not super-adaptable. We’ve been through these massive technological shifts, and a massive percentage of the jobs that people do can change over a couple of generations, and over a couple of generations, we seem to absorb that just fine,” the OpenAI said.
He added that the planet has seen “great technological revolutions”, and each technological revolution has gotten faster, and this will be the fastest by far.
“That’s the part that I find potentially a little scary, is the speed with which society is going to have to adapt, and that the labor market will change,” Altman said.
Bill Gates also put forward three things that he worries about with AI: One is that a bad guy is in control of the system. Human purpose. And how do you organise society with AI?
“If we have good guys who have equally powerful systems that hopefully minimizes that problem. There’s the chance of the system taking control,” he said elaborating on his first concern.
For the concern of the “human purpose”, Gates said, “I get a lot of excitement that, hey, I’m good at working on malaria, and malaria eradication, and getting smart people and applying resources to that. When the machine says to me, “Bill, go play pickleball, I’ve got malaria eradication. You’re just a slow thinker,” then it is a philosophically confusing thing.”
“Yes, we’re going to improve education, but education to do what, if you get to this extreme, which we still have a big uncertainty. For the first time, the chance that might come in the next 20 years is not zero,” he said for his third concern.
Altman, addressing these, said although we are giving something up here, in some sense, we are going to have things that are smarter than us. “If we can get into this world of post-scarcity, we will find new things to do. They will feel very different,” he said adding that maybe instead of solving malaria, you’re deciding which galaxy you like, and what you’re going to do with it.
“I’m confident we’re never going to run out of problems, and we’re never going to run out of different ways to find fulfilment and do things for each other and understand how we play our human games for other humans in this way that’s going to remain really important,” he said.
“It is going to be different for sure, but I think the only way out is through. We have to go do this thing. It’s going to happen. This is now an unstoppable technological course. The value is too great. And I’m pretty confident, very confident, we’ll make it work, but it does feel like it’s going to be so different,” the OpenAI CEO added.
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Published: 11 Apr 2024, 04:39 PM IST