
It's no secret that Bill Gates is all about artificial intelligence, but he's now predicting that the technology will be transformative for everyone within the next five years.
The rise of artificial intelligence has sparked fears that the technology will eliminate millions of jobs worldwide. The International Monetary Fund reported this week that around 40% of jobs worldwide could be affected by the rise of AI.
Gates doesn't necessarily disagree with this notion, but he believes that history shows that with every new technology comes fear and then new opportunity.
"Like we had with agricultural productivity in 1900, people were like, 'Hey, what are people going to do?' "In fact, a lot of new things, a lot of new job categories were created, and we're much better off than when everybody was doing farm work," Gates said. "That will be so."
In an interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN on Tuesday, Gates predicted that AI will make life easier for everyone, especially by helping doctors do their paperwork, which is "the part of the job that hasn't been done." like, we can make it very efficient."
Since it doesn't need "a lot of new hardware," Gates said AI will be accessed through "a phone or a computer. He also said the improvements with OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 were "dramatic" because it "can basically read and write," so "it's almost like having a white-collar worker, to give health advice, to help with writing code, help with technical support calls. He said that incorporating that technology into the education or medical sectors would be "fantastic".
Microsoft has a multi-billion dollar partnership with OpenAI. Gates remains one of Microsoft's largest shareholders.
"The goal of the Gates Foundation is to make sure that the lag between benefiting people in poor countries and reaching rich countries will be very short," Gates told Zakaria in Davos for the World Economic Forum. "After all, the shortage of doctors and teachers is much more acute in Africa than in the West."
The IMF, in its report this week, took a much less optimistic view, stating that AI would deepen inequality without the intervention of politicians.