Bill Gates Reveals Superhuman AI Prediction

I'm Rufus grisim and this is the next big idea today Bill Gates on AI the path to Super intelligence and what it means for all of us I suspect that every moment in human history has felt pivotal precarious as if anything could happen certainly in the last few hundred years but it also must be true that some moments are more pivotal than others this is one of those moments we've seen the impact of transformative technological change the internet has sped the world up and social media now on most every phone and most every hand has

polarized our communities hyperbolized our politics and now we are in the early moments of the AI Revolution what will the next decade bring there are few people I would rather ask this question than Microsoft co-founder and Global philanthropist Bill Gates Bill's been at the Forefront of the race to build machines that can Empower humans for 50 years ever since he declared his mission to put a computer on every desk in every home he was instrumental in driving the development of personal Computing in the 80s the growth of the internet in the 90s and more recently

leading the charge to eradicate malaria and other diseases in the last few years he's been on the front lines of Microsoft's partnership with open Ai and the development of GPT how is it you may be wondering that Bill Gates has ended up joining us today well for the last few months I've been reading a book that's being published serially by Harvard Business Review it's called AI first and it features interviews with folks like Reed Hoffman Mustafa sullan Sam Alman and Bill who collectively make the case that AI isn't overhyped it's underhyped we thought it would

be interesting to not just interview the co-authors of this book career technologist Andy sack an old friend of mine and former Starbucks Chief digital officer Adam brotman and they suggested inviting one of their most interesting interviewees Bill Gates and so what's Bill's Take on the AI Revolution super intelligence is coming there's no clear way to slow it down and the technology available today is already a GameChanger this is largely a good thing we can harness AI to solve our biggest Global problems we are likely to live in decades to come in a world of super

abundance but it will take vigilance to make sure it's the world we want for ourselves and generations to come Bill Gates welcome to the next big idea thank you Bill Andy and Adam and I were just talking about the digital Transformations we've seen in our own lives in the last 40 years and you haven't just seen these Transformations you've played an instrumental role in moving them forward um you've said that the demo you saw last September of gp4 was mindblowing was it more mindblowing than the first demo of the graphical user interface that you saw

at at Xerox Park in in 1980 I'd say yes I mean I'd seen graphical interface prior to the xero park stuff and um that you know was an embodiment that helped motivate a lot of what apple and Microsoft did uh with personal Computing in the you know the decade after that uh you know people kind of take it for granted today that that we have those interfaces but you know compared to unlocking a a a new type of intelligence that can read and write uh Graphics interface is is clearly less impactful uh which is saying

a lot well I I was interested to learned that AI is not a new interest of yours um you were intrigued as a student way back in the 70s and uh I gather you you wrote a I think a letter to your parents and said effectively Mom Dad I may miss out on the AI Revolution if I start this company which is the company that became Microsoft the AI Revolution took a little longer than Maybe maybe you might have guessed back then now it's happening what interested you about AI in those early days and and

is it becoming what you'd imagin back then well certainly anybody who writes software is thinking about what human cognition is able to achieve and you know making that comparison and when I was in high school you know there were things like shaky the robot at uh Stanford Research Institute which should engage in reasoning and come up with an execution plan and move you know figure out to move the ramp and go up the ramp and grab the blocks and you know it felt like some of these key capabilities uh whether it was speech recognition image

recognition you know would be fairly solvable you there were a lot of attempts and so-called rule-based systems and things that just didn't capture the richness and so in our respect for human cognition you know constantly goes up as we try to match pizzas of it but we saw with um machine learning techniques we could match uh vision and speech recognition you know so that's powerful but the the Holy Grail that even after those advances you know I kept highlighting was the ability to read and represent knowledge like humans did was just you know nothing was

was good at all uh you know then language translation came down but but still that was uh a very special case uh thing but you know gp4 in a very deep way far beyond gpt3 you know showed that we could access and represent knowledge and it's you know the fluency in in many respects although not the accuracy is is already superum yeah it's it's just astounding we we never would have guessed that moving the chess pieces on the chess board would be harder than becoming a better chess player than Kasparov but but it's it's interesting

to see how what what the challenges turn out to be um and as you said that that Xerox Park demo set the agenda for Microsoft for maybe the next 15 years right the development of Windows and office and and do you think that the impact of of what's happening right now in AI is going to set the agenda for uh for the next many decades and uh even more so it's absolutely the most important thing going on it'll it'll shape Humanity in a very dramatic way it's at the same time that we have you know

synthetic biology and Robotics you know being controlled by the AIS you know so we have to keep in mind those other things but the dominant uh change agent will be AI in in 1980 you had a light bulb moment when you famously declared there will be a computer in every home on every desk what do you think the equivalent is is for AI do you think do you think we'll have an AI advisor in in every ear well the form factor the hardware form factor doesn't matter that much but the idea of the earbud that's

both adding audio and canceling out audio and enhancing audio clearly will be a very primary form factor just like glasses uh that can project sort of arbitrary video into your visual field uh will be you know sort of the embodiment of how you're interacting but the personal agent you know that I've been writing about for decades that's you know Superior to a human insistant in that it's uh tracking and reading all the things that you wanted to read um and you know just there to help you and understands the context enough that you know silly

things like you don't trust software today to even order your email messages it's in a you know stupid dumb time ordered form because the contextual understanding of okay what am I about to do next what's the nature of the task that these messages relate to you don't trust software to combine all of the you know new information in including uh new Communications you know you go to your mail and that's time ordered you go to your text and that's time ordered you go to your social network and that time ordered I mean computers are operating

at a a almost trivial level of semantics in terms of understanding what's your intent when you sit down with the machine or helping you with your activities and now that they can essentially read like a white collar worker uh that interface will be entirely agent driven you know agent executive assistant agent mental therapy agent friend agent girlfriend agent expert all driven by uh deep Ai and it seems like it will be useful in proportion to how much it knows about us and I imagine at some point in the not too distant future probably all four

of us will be asked if we want to turn on audio so our AI assistant can effectively like listen to our our whole life right and and I would and I would think that there there'll be benefits to do that because we'll get Good Counsel good advice um do you think that's true and do you think will will you turn it on when invited to turn on the audio well computers today see every email message that I write um and certainly digital channels are seen you know all my online meetings and and phone calls so

you're already disclosing into digital systems uh a lot about yourself and so yes the value added of the agent um in terms of summarize that meeting or help me with those follow-ups um you know be phenomenal and the agent will have different modes in terms of which of your information it's able to operate with so there will be partitions that um you have but for your essentially executive assistant agent you know you won't exclude much at all from that that partition ruus before we go further down the the agent pathway one question that I've been

thinking about since since our interview with you Bill for AI first um in which you talked about really comparing the your experience at Xerox Park versus your experience experiencing chat bt4 so of I I think you're in the the most unique position there probably a couple of other people that I could think of but you're in the most unique um position to have the set of understanding of computer technology as well as building business and how computers affect human beings I'm curious if you're if what you said in this conversation which was chbt was as

big it sounded like you even said it was bigger than your Xerox Park Park moment what does that make you think about when you think about your grandchild's life and what what advice do you have for the sort of the next generation of leaders for tackling the challenges that are unique to AI um sort of curious about that perspective you know there's certainly novel problems uh in that other Technologies develop slower and the upper bound of their capabilities uh is pretty identifiable I mean you know yes mechanization made farming more efficient and so people worried

about okay where's the labor demand come and over time that question was answered very succinctly even though at the time you know there were Generations that never had to experience that or adjust to it you you know so this technology is in terms of its capability is and it will reach um even modulo reliability will reach superhuman levels we're not there today if you put in the um the reliability constraint a lot of the the new work is adding a level of metacognition that done properly will solve uh the sort of erratic nature of the

the genius that uh is easily available uh today in the white colar realm and over time in the blue collar realm as well so yes this is this is a a huge milestone um that uh some of those past things are helpful too but um it's novel enough that nobody nobody's faced uh the the policy issues which are mostly of a very positive nature in terms of uh White Collar labor productivity what's the thing that excites you the most about the invention well all these shortages there's no organization that faces white collar shortage as much

as the Gates Foundation where we look at Health in uh subsaharan Africa or other development countries or you know lack of teachers who can engage you in a deep way you know ideally in your native language um and so the idea that modulo whatever the the server cost is that by using the mobile phone infrastructure that you know continues to drive pretty significant penetration even in in very poor countries the idea that medical advice and personal tutors can be delivered uh where you know because it's meeting you in your language and your semantics there isn't

like some big training thing that's taking place there you just pick up your phone and listen uh you know to to what it's saying so you know it's very exciting uh to take the tragic lack of resources that uh particularly people in developing countries have to deal with and and you you've been working for your 20 years on the Gates Foundation and really tackling uh these issues of global Health Care education climate change um do you think that I mean we're just speaking to education and Healthcare do you think that AI will be an accelerant

that will make it possible to accomplish in 5 or 10 years what it took the last 20 years to accomplish or how how meaningful do you think the the the the acceleration is likely to be in these areas well the very tough problems of some you know diseases that we don't have great tools for AI will help a lot the last 20 years we you know was pretty miraculous in that we cut child to death in half from 10 million a year to 5 million a year that was largely by using getting tools like certain

vaccines uh to be cheaper and making sure they were getting to all the world's children and so that was kind of loow hanging fruit and now we have you know tougher issues but with the AIS um the the Upstream Discovery part of okay why do kids get malnourished or and why has it been so hard to make an HIV vaccine yes we can be you know way more uh optimistic about those those huge breakthroughs you know AI will help us with every aspect of these things the the advice the delivery the diagnosis um the scientific

discovery piece is is you know moving ahead at a a pretty incredible clip um and the gates foundation's you know very very involved in funding quite a bit of that yeah the uh we had we had uh your friend Saul Khan on the show recently and uh got the chance to spend a bunch of time with K Migo and was I was just astonished by what that can do I know I know you were recently in New Jersey um visiting schools that are implementing uh KH Academy's new programs and and that's uh that's pretty exciting

this idea that that that improving education at scale for billions of people the impact of that is is is pretty hard to hard to measure yeah I mean Sals book is you know doesn't say okay what world are we educating kids for it's just if all AI was was available in education you know that's pretty miraculous because you have the other things shifting at the same time it's you know a little more confusing but you know that realm where he says okay what if it was just an education uh you know it's incredibly positive yeah

well that's that that gets to the personal part of of of your you know I think you have a new granddaughter I know Adam has a seven-year-old and when we think of this question of like what what does it look like um I mean fantastic that our kids will have an Aristotle level private tutor um to to to help uh you know further accelerate their educational process but there is the question of like what will what will they need to know to be effective in the in the world um and uh my my kids and

Andy's kids are a little older but I know Adam you've got a younger daughter and yeah bill you got a new granddaughter it's interesting because Bill I wanted to come at this room a slightly different direction but since you brought it up she you know she's um able to really she watches me use whisper mode on Chacha PT she's she's you know seen me live in an AI world and it's fascinating to watch her be very comfortable with the voice interface especially at her age it's actually easier for her to do voice interface than you

know she's still learning how to spell I mean she just figured out how to read so um I thought that was an interesting call look into you know how much is this going to be not just natural language chat but even voice chat versus point and click but Bill I was going to ask you something about the direction it maybe come out this from a slightly different direction which is what do you think about this debate there's a little bit of a debate going on maybe that's too strong of a word about whether or not

the fact that all these Frontier or Foundation models have sort of clustered at their benchmarks around chat bt4 and there's a you know there are some people that are on the side that you know we're plateauing or something like that and then there's but most of the smartest researchers I follow tend to still say with the fact that the scaling laws are going to continue to apply for at least the next couple years I'd love to get your take on a where do where do you come out on that on that discussion and B do

you find yourself rooting for it to Plateau or do you are you like emotionally agnostic because of some of the concerns around the technology well the the the big Frontier is not so much scaling we have you know probably two more turns of the crank on scaling where by accessing video data and getting very good at synthetic data that we can scale up probably you know two more times that's not the most interesting Dimension the most interesting Dimension is is what I call metacognition where understanding how to think about a problem in a broad sense

and step back uh and say okay how important is this answer answer uh how could I check my answer you know what external tools would help me with this the overall cognitive strategy is so trivial today that you know it's just generating through constant computation each token in sequence and it's mind-blowing that that works at all uh it does not step back like a human and think okay I'm going to write this paper and here's what I want to cover here's okay I'll put some facts in here's what I want to do for the summary

and so you see this limitation when you have a problem like uh various math things like a Sudoku puzzle where just generating that upper leftand uh thing first it causes it to be wrong on anything above a certain complexity so we're get we're going to get the scaling benefits but at the same time the various actions to change the the underlying reasoning algorithm from the trivial that we have today to more humanlike metacognition that's the big Frontier that uh it's a little hard to predict how quickly that'll happen you know I've seen that we will

make progress on that next year but we won't completely solve it uh for some time after that so your you know your Genius will get to be more predictable now in certain domains comined domains we are getting to the point of being able to show extreme accuracy on some of the math or even some of the health type domains but the open-ended thing will require General breakthroughs on on metacognition and and do you think that metacognition uh will involve building in a looping mechanism so there's so the AI develops uh an ability to ruminate as

we Homo sapiens do um and is there I've heard some people like Max Tark suggest that that that could be part of what makes us conscious is this ability to have conversations with ourselves yeah Consciousness May relate to metacognition it's you know it's not a phenomena that is subject to measurement so it's always tricky and you know clearly these digital things are unlikely to have any any such equivalent um but you know it is it is the big Frontier that and it will be humanik in terms of uh you know knowing to work hard on

certain hard problems and having a sense of confidence uh and a ways of of checking what what you've done yeah Phil I was going to just ask about the second part of Adam's question the do you find yourself rooting like given this I mean one of the thing that I'll just say in the process of writing and interviewing you for for AI first as well as Reed Hoffman and Sam Alman uh Mustafa it's been an education for it you know it's been an education for Adam and I and I come away from these conversations regularly

going oh my goodness um and and I'm blown away at the pay like I'm paying attention every day to the pace of the technological Advance by really um many different companies bit large large companies there's a lot of money there's a lot of talent being poured into us and so the pace of the development is and and the potential impact of that technological advance um astounded by and have some Li limited understanding um that was where I was getting at with my question that you're uniquely positioned to actually have some some point of view on

your own grocking of like are you do you think we're moving too fast uh I know there's no really slowing it down what do you do about the fact that we're moving at what the speed that we're moving um so it sort of is what it is but I'm just sort of curious how you interpret that you know if we knew how to slow it down a lot of people would probably say okay let's you know consider doing that um you know as Mustafa writes in his book the incentive structures don't really have some mechanism

that's all that plausible of of how that would happen given the individual and uh company and even government level thing if the government level incentive structure was understood you you know that alone might might be enough um and you know like the people who say oh it's fine that it's open source you know they're willing to say well okay if it gets you know too good maybe we'll stop open sourcing it but you know will they know what that is uh and would they really say okay maybe the next one um you know so you

you pretty quickly go to let's not let people with Mal intent benefit you know from having a better AI than uh you know the sort of Defense good intent side of you know cyber defense or uh War defense or biot Terror defense um you know you're not you know you're not going to completely put the genie back in the bottle and and yet that means that you know somebody with negative intent will be empowered in a in a new way so perhaps not a good idea for the most sophisticated AI models to be open source

in your judgment give given this global environment yeah and people sort of seed that point in principle but then when you try to get to say okay specifically uh where would you apply that it it gets a bit less clear I mean Adam and I were talking yesterday about how even if it were possible hypothetically to stop AI development exactly where it is right now it would probably take 10 years of forum 3 and other folks helping companies and individuals figure out how to apply the technology that currently exists right I mean the the we

already have an AI That's powerful enough I think to have profound implications uh it it feels it feels like we could easily benefit from 5 to 10 years just thinking of all the useful applications of the the the level of AI we have today do you think so I'm not sure about that because you know it's pretty clear you know I want to make an image okay what do I have to learn I have to learn English uh this is the software meeting us not us meeting the software you know so it's not like there's

some new menu you know file edit window help and oh you got to learn that you have to type the formula into the cell this is you saying hm I wish I could do data an analysis to see which of these you know products is responsible for a Slowdown and it understands exactly what you're saying so the idea that there's a impedance of adoption uh it's not the normal thing yes company processes um that are very used to doing things the old way uh will have to adjust but if you look at you know Tes

support Tes sales uh data analytics you know give somebody a week of watching a an advanced user and you know say no Manual of any kind just you know learn by example of how the stuff has been used the uptake assuming there's no limit in terms of the you know server capacity that connects these things up which I don't expect certainly in rich countries there'll be a gigantic limitation there and you're talking about an adoption rate that won't be overnight but it won't be like you know 10 years for us uh you know the number

of things I take human translation the idea that a free product provides arbitrary audio and text human translation I mean that was a holy grail of oh my God if you ever had a company that could do that it would collect you know tens of billions and revenue and you know solve the tower Babble and here you know kind of a small AI company is providing that as an afterthought free feature um right totally it's you know pretty wild and you say well oh how are people going to adapt to free translation I don't think

it's going to take them that that long to know hey I want to know what that guy was saying uh and you know you can separate the two audio Channels with earbuds or something and you know there you are and yes the quality of that a year from now and the coverage of of say all African languages will get completed you know the foundations making sure that even obscure languages that are not written languages that were in partnership with others Gathering the data for those the Indian government's doing that for Indian languages so I don't

think saying hey calm down it takes a long time uh to figure out you know how to utter the description of the birthday card you want you know and so it'll take you know 10 years for the legging person people to to switch their behavior well well we see I think I think Sam Alman said on your on your podcast unconfused me which I enjoy uh that there're seeing a productivity Improvement of up to 300% I think among their developers uh and in other sectors I think we've seen reports of you know 25 50% increases

in productivity um so that just just getting that you know you know the great Gibson line the future is here it's just not evenly distributed it it does feel like getting all companies to fully benefit from that level of productivity enhancement certainly will be a pro a process of some kind um I I was interested in your comment in the first chapter of AI first uh which is about productivity you said productivity isn't a mere measure of output per hour it's about enhancing the quality and creativity of our achievements what uh what do you mean

by that well whenever you have an productivity increase you can um take your x% increase and increase the quantity of the activity that the quantity of the output you can improve the quality of the output or you can re reduce the human labor hours that goes in input and so you always take those three things you know there are some things when they get more productive like when the tire industry went from non radial tires to radial tires even though the the cost you know per year of Tire usage went down by a factor four

you know people didn't respond by saying okay I'm going to drive four times as much so the demand eless itic it for some things like Computing or the quality of uh a news story there's very high demand elasticity if you can do a better job you you just leave the human labor hours alone uh and take most of it in in the quality Dimension and then you have a lot of things where that's not the case at all the the appetite uh you know for for miles driven you know did not change so Society is

full of many things uh that are across that spectrum and so whenever you have rapid productivity increases you know we there was a memo inside Microsoft about how we were going to make databases so efficient that it would become a zero-sized market uh now in that case uh we're still in the part of the curve uh where you have demand elasticity but you know someday uh will even in that domain will will get past uh incremental demand bill I got one one one last question I can pop in here if you were making a guess

right now and you mentioned healthc care and education how would you respond to the question about you know what what do you think the first big I'll call it breakthrough you know application will be like for example like one of the podcasts that Andy and I like to listen to they were talking this weekend they keep saying oh we haven't seen you know the big breakthrough application and and I'm you know which is interesting because there's I'm not sure that's true but I let's just take it for on its face value that we're still in

the sort of I'll call it experimentation phase or whatever which is what they were trying to say I'd be curious to get your what's your thought like where do we see the first big you know the Uber like if if if like you know location services and mobile Cloud the first big app was kind of uber and everyone talked about Uber being an example of that I it was probably before before that it was probably Google Maps right I was probably map technology yeah that's right that's right so we have when you just think out

like do you do you go right to education healthc care you know where do where does your head go when you think oh I'll bet you the first big breakthrough app consumer app or even industrial app will be what well I guess the naysayers are pretty creative to be able to say something hasn't happened I mean I agree they they don't think you know no yeah summarizing meetings or you know doing translation or making product programmers more productive I mean that's it it's mindblowing you know this is White Collar capability with a footnote that if

if in in many open Ed scenarios it's not as reliable as humans are you you can hire humans and they can go haywire and so you have some monitoring but that you know these things if it put into new territory are you know somewhat less uh predictable as there's some domains where we can bound what goes on like support calls or Tes sales calls where you're not pushing off the edge uh at all so I don't know I I I just can't imagine what they're talking about that you know let me let me try and

let me try and I think like you know I think it's a the comment when people say that not withstanding what you just said bill they they're creative and their naysaying capabilities um because I think that's you're your response is accurate um for sure it's like when the car was developed you know you it's the second order effect when the car was developed it could get you from point A to point B um and you might even be able to predict uh the development of roads and highways Etc but you might not be able to

predict Los Angeles or suburbs um and uh all you know drive-in movie theaters and and in the case of I think when in more modern um stance the worldwide web came OG and there were lots of brochure wear and you know there was uh travel agent Expedia came along and that was all sort of like run-of-the-mill first order effect but people point at Uber as a second order effect on the technology on that that sort of was like oh you couldn't have predicted that now maybe you could maybe you couldn't but that's what I think

that's what Adam's question I think is going for when you look at AI I mean per in many ways search is the game of search has already changed which is ubiquitous um um uh consumer activity uh and certainly chat gbt was a Monumental the fastest growing technology uh adopted uh technology in our ever so I don't I'm not minimizing or giving credence than the Nays but it's really about the second order effects now we yeah we you know chat gpt3 was not that interesting I mean it was interesting enough that a few people that open

the eye felt the scaling effect would cross a threshold and I I didn't predict that and very few people did and we only crossed that threshold less than two years ago uh a year and a half in terms of General availability so we are very much in the people who are open-minded and you know are willing to try out new things are the ones using it but you know you just demo okay here's image editing and no I'm not teaching you 59 menus and dialogues in Photoshop to do editing I'm telling you type get rid

of that green sweater and people are like oh I don't know if I could do that I mean that sounds very hard to me uh you know and when you show people that it's like what make that photo bigger I didn't take I didn't take a shot that was bigger but I'd like the photo to be bigger so fill in the missing piece to make it bit and it's like what you know or patient followup you know where it calls you up and talks you about did you fulfill your prescription how are you feeling you

know what are you doing I mean uh you you people may get saturated if they really try and expose themselves to the the various examples I I do think they'd be saturated oh my God this is you know a lot of extremely concrete capability and you know then you think okay when I call up to ask about my taxes when I want my medical bill explained the that you know white collar worker uh is almost free type mentality is the the best way to kind of predict what this thing suffuses to even though I fully

admit there's a footnote there that it's in some ways still a little bit of a crazy white collar worker uh but you know that we're going to get rid of that footnote uh over a period of years I I know one of those crazy white collar workers who who's a CEO of a company that's growing very quickly who ask his top salespeople what takes you the most time during this day and they said writing drafting follow-up emails following sales calls and he created an instance of GPT to you know pulled in all their all their

best practices best Communications automatically transcribes every phone call and automatically generates the follow-up email uh and he he's he's laying off half of his sales team so that the best half of his sales team uh can do can work because they can now work twice as efficiently so there we have both a a a success story in the sense that it's it's a it's a highly efficient and wildly impressive implementation of the technology but there's for the other half of the sales team it's not quite as exciting unless they can use new AI Technologies to

build a competing company or to do something else which I guess you know gets to this broader question of like to what extent do we think this empowers the little guy versus the big guy I mean we're seeing that there just a few big big companies seem to be the dominant players in the development of the technology um but on the other hand it does seem that everyone has access to gp4 Omni um at now for free uh so there there's also an equalizing element well it's important to distinguish two parts of economic activity one

is the economic activity building AI products and both Bas level AI products and then vertical AI products and we can say for sure that the barriers to entry are uniquely low uh in that we're in this Mania period where you know somebody literally raised $6 billion dollar in cash you know for a company and many others raised hundreds of millions and you know so the idea that there's you know there's never been as much Capital going into a new category you could even say a new Mania category I mean this makes the internet or the

early Auto industry Mania look you know quite small in terms of the percentage of IQ and and the valuations uh you know that come out of this I mean you know there was no company before the turn of the century that had ever been worth a trillion dollars here we have one ship company who doesn't make chips it's a chip design company uh that in six months adds a trillion dollars of value uh you know that and so the the Dynamics within the AI space is is both hyperco competitive but with lots of entry and

yes Google and Microsoft have the most Capital but uh that's not really stopping people either in the base capabilities or or in those verticals once you leave the AI tools domain which as big as it is is a Modest part of the global economy how that gets applied to okay I'm a small Hospital Chain versus a big hospital chain you know now when I have these tools to that you know level the plane field or not you would hope that it would uh and that you can offer it for the same price are less a

far better level of service all of these things are in the further furtherance of getting the value down to the customer and you know figuring out early in an industry where the barriers are so that some of the improvements stick with companies versus perfect competition where it all goes to the end users that's very hard you know to Think Through you know like pick and shovels is saying okay look to the side Industries uh you know as well as to the primary industry you know Savings and Loans did better than homebuilders uh because they there

was a more scarce uh capability there that you know a few did better than others so the it's asking a lot but you know it's it is people are being forced to think about the competitive Dynamics in these other business es you know when you free up labor that labor Society is essentially richer uh that you know through your tax system you can take that labor and put it into you know smaller class size or uh helping the elderly better you know and your net better off uh now for the person involved they may like

that transition or not and it requires some political capacity to do that redirection and you can you know have a view of our current trust in our political capacity uh to reach consensus and uh you know create effective programs but you know it it's the frontier of possibilities is improved by increased productivity you'd never want to run the clock backwards and say you know thank God we were less productive uh you know 20 years ago do you think that uh we were talking earlier about the impossibility of of slowing down or or the great difficulty

of slowing down the the current pace of AI development do you think AI companies should be governed and if so by whom by by Boards by government by all of the above well government is the only place where the overall well-being of society as a whole you know including against attack and you know Jud system that's fair and you know creating educational opportunities so the the you can't expect the private sector to walk away from Market driven opportunity unless the government decides what the rules are so this is although the private sector should help educate

government work with government uh the the governments will have to play a big role here um and you know so that's a dialogue that people are investing in um now governments will will take the things that are most concrete like what are the copyright rules or what are the abuses of deep fakes or you know in some applications does the unreliability say health diagnosis or um um hiring decisions you know mean that you ought to move more slowly or or create some uh liability for those things they'll tend to focus in on those short-term issues

which you know that's fine but you know the biggest issue has to do with the adjustments to productivity that overall you know should be a phenomenal opportunity if political capacity and the speed which which it was coming uh were were paired very well um our environment of of of polarization doesn't help the uh the effectiveness of our government um and I think you mentioned on your podcast that in a worst case scenario we could imagine polarization you know breaking our democracy um do you think AI can help us all get along uh and if so

how would it do that well it's such a powerful tool that at least we ought to consider in for all our tough problems where it can be beneficial or where it can exacerbate things so certainly if somebody wants to understand okay uh where did this come from this article or this video you know can you what is the Providence you know is that provably a reliable source uh or is this information accurate or you know in general in my news feed you know what am I seeing that you know somebody who's voting for The Other

Side what have they seen uh and you know try to explain to me what has pushed them in that direction uh you'd hope that you know sort of the again going back to the Paradigm of uh White CER capability being uh almost free that you know well-intended people who want to bridge those misunderstandings would have the tools of AI to highlight misinformation for them or highlight uh bias for them uh or help them you know be in the mindset uh and understand okay how do we Bridge the different views of the world that that we

have um so yes I although it it sounds outlandish it's like you know when people say oh let's use geoengineering for climate they're like oh no you always think you know technology might be the answer and yeah you know I'm okay I'm I'm somewhat guilty of that but here uh the AIS are going to be both part of the solution while if we're not careful also potentially exacerbating these things things and you can almost say it's good they that the blue collar job substitution stuff is more delayed than the the white collar stuff so that

you know it's not just anyone sector and actually it's the more educated sector that seen these changes first I hadn't thought of that okay last question um you've said that a possible future problem that that befuddles you is how to think about our purpose as humans in a World in which machines can solve problems better than we can do is this a is this a nagging concern that Contin that you continue to wrestle with how do you think about it now well I don't think somebody who spent you know 68 years in a world of

shortage uh and you know okay we use Market mechanisms to you know deal with the shortage we use various incentive structures to innovate to create more Supply capacity I doubt that either at that absolute age or having been immersed in in such an utterly different environment that the ability to imagine you know this post shortage uh type world will come from anyone near my age um so right you know I view it as a very important problem uh that people people should contemplate but no I I that's not one uh that um I I have

the solution or or would expect to have although although you have some experience with living in a post scarcity world in the sense that you haven't had scarcity in your own personal life for for a few years now I haven't had Financial scarcity but yeah you know somebody who's had the enjoyment of being successful and sees problems out there like malaria or polio or measles the satisfaction that okay the number of people who work on this the amount of research money for this is very very scarce and so I feel a unique value added in

taking my own resources and working with governments to orchestrate okay let's not have any kids die of malaria let's not have any kids die of measles so you're right financially that you know what I do for fun you know is a potential uh kind of thing that people can do you know play pickle ball cu the machines the fact the machines will be good at pickle ball you know we that won't bother us we'll you know still uh enjoy uh that as a a human thing but the you know the satisfaction of helping out reduce

scarcity um you know that that which is the thing that that motivates me that also goes away yeah yeah yeah yeah so the true last question I rumor has it you're working on a memoir can you tell us anything about that yeah we announced that in next February uh sort of a a first volume that covers my life up till the first two or three years of Microsoft about age 25 or so called source code will come out so I'm working on editing that right now uh since we're we're about to hit deadlines but yeah

we got a good reception to the the pre-announcement of the that first volume is is GPT helping you out with that actually no um you know not because I'm against it or anything I suppose in the end we maybe we should but uh no it's still uh we're we're being a little traditional in terms of how we're both writing and editing will there'll be will there'll be two volumes or three volumes you think three so they're you know we'll probably wait three years before we do a second one but you know there's kind of a

a period That's Microsoft oriented and a period that's you know sort of giving all the money away focused well if you and Andy play enough pickle ball may maybe you'll uh live long enough to make a write a fourth volume that's true we hope so you know making AI good we'll make that the the fourth volume exactly well Bill thank you so much uh for joining us today such an interesting conversation yeah fantastic thanks Bill