Bill Gates sees no AI-generated apocalypse in near future

NEW YORK, September 6. /TASS/. Artificial intelligence (AI) will increase productivity in all fields in the next decade instead of destroying the world, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said in an interview with the Verge.
“Well, the near-term issues are more using it in a positive way, in areas like health and education. <…>. So, for the next decade, we’ll be experiencing increased productivity in a lot of areas, which is overwhelmingly very good news,” he said, replying to a question as to whether he believed “the prophecies of doom” or worried “about AI destroying the world.” Gates explained that in good hands, AI is “a beneficial thing, and we need to just shape it in the right way.”
He also noted that he sees no threat in AI being used as a global disinformation tool. In his opinion, the very technology of AI does not create such problems, while “people can type misinformation into a word processor. They don’t need AI, you know, to type out crazy things.”
“And so I’m not sure that, other than creating deepfakes, AI really changes the balance there. In fact, I’d say that as people talk about reducing misinformation, the role of AI can be a positive role in terms of looking at what’s going on in a superefficient way,” Gates said.
Earlier, in an interview with the Independent, Gates said that AI will change society more than any other technological or scientific innovation in the history of humanity and the world “will need governments to rein in corporations and restructure society to deal with the myriad effects of AI.” According to him, “there’s no upper limit to this technology,” and “the coming AI revolution will reshape society more thoroughly than any previous leap forward in human history.”