The AI world was rather quiet and peaceful, until people realized its potential, and found the possible extent of using the technology.
Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, has seen lots of tech advancements throughout his life and career.
As a person who has written his name in history as the person who revolutionized personal computers, Gates is also known as the person who made numerous theories that were later became true.
He predicted the COVID-19 pandemic, and saw the emergence of AI coming, and how the technology can affect the labor market.
As more and more people, and more and more companies and organizations, as well as governments, are experimenting with AI to unlock its full potential, Gates called on the public to be prepared.
He theorized that the trend could "kill" millions of people.
According to Bill Gates in a post on his personal blog, Gates Notes:
"Every government wants to have the most powerful technology so it can deter attacks from its adversaries. This incentive to not let anyone get ahead could spark a race to create increasingly dangerous cyber weapons. Everyone would be worse off."
Or even scarier, "what if a future AI decides it doesn’t need humans anymore and wants to get rid of us?" Gates said.
These are all questions people can ask, and they have the rights to be concerned.
AI of the future shall not be as "rosy" as what people think because some of the risks and threats are real.
As more and more people use AI and realize its potential, there is not way of stopping them from doing what they want to do.
Then, there are deepfakes to misinformation, for example, and how AI can take away people’s jobs.
AI inherits humanity's biases, and because of that, it's also able to make things up, hallucinate, and confidently makes some claim that simply is not true.
Then lastly, in the "Age of AI," as what Gates calls it, which is yet another profound change humanity is facing, things get scary because people have yet to understand the technology's fullest capacity, and the rate it's changing is to quick that it isn't clear exactly what will happen next.
However, despite AI is a different 'being,' it shouldn't be something that scare people.
"This is not the first time a major innovation has introduced new threats that had to be controlled. We’ve done it before," he said.
"In a moment like this, it’s natural to feel unsettled. But history shows that it’s possible to solve the challenges created by new technologies."
According to the billionaire, "no one has all the answers," meaning that "the future of AI is not as grim as some people think."
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This is because AI can be used for good purposes as well as bad ones, and according to Gates, government and private-sector security teams have to find and fix flaws before criminals can take advantage of them.
"Cyber-criminals won’t stop making new tools. Nor will people who want to use AI to design nuclear weapons and bioterror attacks. The effort to stop them needs to continue at the same pace," he said.
There are lots of advantages of using AI, like helping solve health, education, climate change, and more. While the risks of the increasingly advancing AI can be high, Gates still think that it's still manageable.
People have experienced the introduction of various innovations and discoveries that were all scary to them at the time, but later became useful and that they eventually cannot live without.
From fire to cars, to computers and the internet.
" [...] people have managed through other transformative moments and, despite a lot of turbulence, come out better off in the end," said Gates.