A Conversation With Bill Gates About the Dawn of Superhuman AI

We are coming up on the five-year anniversary of the Next Big Idea podcast, nearly 250 episodes under our belt. I have had the great pleasure of talking with many of my intellectual heroes, captains of industry, and people who have made me want to be a better human. But this conversation with Bill Gates makes my short list of favorites.

Listen to our conversation on Apple or Spotify, and share your thoughts in the comments below — I look forward to discussing this with you.

In our lifetimes, each of us has seen the impact of transformative technological change – the internet has sped up the world up, and social media — on most every phone, in most every hand — has polarized our communities, hyperbolized our politics. 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 has 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. And in the last few years, he’s been on the front lines of Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI, and the development of GPT.

How is it that Bill Gates has ended up joining us today? Well, for the past few months, I have been reading a book that is being published serially by Harvard Business Review. It’s called AI First. And it features interviews with folks like Reid Hoffman , Mustafa Suleyman , Sam Altman , and Bill Gates , who collectively make the case that AI isn’t over-hyped — it’s under-hyped.

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? Here are a few of the insights he shared:

• Superhuman AI is coming. We are going to get scaling benefits, and we are going to improve the underlying reasoning algorithm. "It's hard to predict how quickly that will happen. I have seen that we will make progress in the next year, but we won't completely solve it for some time after that."
• There is no clear way to slow it down. If there were, "many people would be interested in that."
• The technology available today is already a game changer. "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 tens of billions in revenue and solve the Tower of Babel. And here a small AI company is providing that as an afterthought free feature."
• Soon, we will each have intelligent agents that function as "executive assistants, mental therapists, friends, girlfriends, all driven by deep AI."
• AI has the potential to help us all do a better job of getting along. "Well-intentioned people who want to bridge those misunderstandings would have the tools of AI to highlight misinformation for them or highlight bias for them or help them be in the mindset and understand, Okay, how do we bridge the different views of the world that we have?"

The acceleration of AI, Bill tells us, is largely a good thing. We have the potential to harness AI to solve our biggest global problems. We are likely to live, in decades to come, in a world of superabundance. But it will take vigilance to make sure it’s the world we want for ourselves, and generations to come.?

Listen to our conversation on Apple or Spotify, and share your thoughts in the comments below — let's discuss!