Excellent new Bill Gates essay on the urgency of having a coherent AI plan

Excellent new essay by Bill Gates, echoing many of the themes I have been writing about here and in my 2024 book Taming Silicon Valley:

• The critical, lasting importance of the decisions we make now.

• The risks that AI creates, around bioterrorism, deepfakes, disinformation, cyberattacks, and so on, empowering criminals such that “Even criminals with very limited skills will be able to target victims at every scale”. He also argues (though I did not anticipate this in the earlier book) that “AI could stunt our kids’ development and replace human relationships”.

• The urgent need for—and lack of—a systematic plan for how society will address AI.

• The importance of having civil society, and not just government and tech companies, centrally involved in devising that plan. (I would also emphasize the critical need for including independent scientists, which Gates does not make explicit).

• The importance of “creating a domestic and international framework for dealing with AI”.

• The need for tax structures and incentives to keep humans employed, and for “rebalanc[ing] how we tax labor and capital.”

You can read Gates’ essay here, and read Taming Silicon Valley — which lays out a fairly detailed plan— here.

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