Bill Gates: AI Will Save ‘Democracy,’ Make ‘Humans Get Along With Each Other’ & ‘Be Less Polarized’
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has suggested that he hopes artificial intelligence (AI) will dictate how “humans” behave toward one another.
According to Gates, powerful AI technology will “help” society to “be less polarized.” Gates believes allowing the human race to have different opinions regarding politics and society is a “super-bad thing” because it “breaks democracy.”
In a Thursday podcast discussion with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Gates said that AI can fix these alleged problems by making “humans” “get along with each other.”
Gates also expressed his vision of how AI could lead to increased world peace and social cohesion in an ideal world in the episode of “Unconfuse Me with Bill Gates” posted to GatesNotes, the billionaire’s blog website.
On Thursday, Microsoft briefly usurped Apple to become the world’s biggest company by market value. The company’s soaring value is due to the boom in artificial intelligence, which has given a massive boost to Microsoft.
The software company’s shares climbed around 1 percent in early trading on Thursday to take its market value to $2.87tn, just ahead of the iPhone maker, whose shares fell by almost 1 percent.
Both Microsoft and OpenAI, along with their main figureheads, have been involved in AI regulatory talks with the White House, senators, and world leaders. “I do think AI, in the best case, can help us with some hard problems,” Gates stated. “Including polarization because potentially that breaks democracy and that would be a super-bad thing.”
During the podcast, Gates and Altman also discussed the potential for AI to establish world peace.
“Whether AI can help us go to war less, be less polarized; you’d think as you drive intelligence, and not being polarized kind of is common sense, and not having war is common sense, but I do think a lot of people would be skeptical,” Gates said. “I’d love to have people working on the hardest human problems, like whether we get along with each other. I think that would be extremely positive if we thought the AI could contribute to humans getting along with each other.”
“I believe that it will surprise us on the upside there,” Altman responded. “The technology will surprise us with how much it can do. We’ve got to find out and see, but I’m very optimistic. I agree with you, what a contribution that would be.”
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