Bill Gates Predicts that Some People Will Live 'Like the Amish' to Avoid AI

Bill Gates argues that the next two decades of AI development will bring “winners and losers,” and he’s arguing it’s up to governments, not tech companies, to manage the fallout. According to Gates, some Americans will live “like the Amish” to avoid AI’s potential for “dramatic harms.” People reports that Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and leftist billionaire, laid out his concerns in a recent episode of the Decoder podcast, hosted by Nilay Patel. “My big concern is this 20-year transition period, where they’ll have winners and losers and a lot of disruption,” Gates said, “and we have to get through that in order to get to that period of abundance.” The remarks came days after Microsoft told employees on October 26 that it was offering a “voluntary exit offer.” Breitbart News previously reported that the buyouts will impact more than a quarter of Microsoft’s entire workforce. On the podcast, Gates argued that AI’s dangers dwarf those of other regulated industries, saying other risks “are not a millionth as dangerous as AI.” He said that once multiple companies are competing to build the technology, no single business can be expected to police it. “Once you have multiple competitors, the level of responsibility can’t be with the companies. It’s completely obvious,” Gates said. “The responsibility becomes the government’s responsibility, just like it is with every other dangerous product, although the magnitude there and the degree of change is minuscule by comparison.” Part of that danger, he told Patel, is how AI could put destructive capabilities within reach of individuals rather than nations. “You don’t want to enable bioterrorism,” Gates said. He added, “We have created something that takes out of the hands of nation states, actually the larger of them, the ability to do dramatic harms.” Gates also described how thoroughly AI could reshape the professional world. “If this was just a machine that could work in medicine or just in law or just in education, that alone would be incredibly disruptive,” he said. But the disruption won’t stop there, he said: “every area of human activity, so far it’s white collar, intellectual work, but fairly soon it will be physical activity and blue collar work as well, through humanoid robots.” Pushed further, Gates sketched out a scenario in which human labor becomes optional for producing goods and services. “If we don’t choose to massively slow down or stop, then we will have robots that can build houses, grow food, do surgery,” he said. “And none of the things that human labor provides to the economy will be necessary for most goods and services.” Even so, Gates suggested some kinds of work might stay in human hands by choice rather than necessity, pointing to childcare, sports, food preparation and art as examples. “Even though the AI could do those things better, we would choose to do that,” he said. He compared this to communities that have already opted out of modern technology. “We’re going to have real choices. We have had groups, not large groups, but like the Amish, who don’t live at the technology frontier,” Gates said. “A lot of humanity may choose not to live at the technological frontier because of things we get from helping each other or coming up with unique ideas.” Looking across the full arc of change he expects, Gates said the shift “is going to be as tumultuous a period as there’s been in human history.” He explained why he felt compelled to raise the alarm despite the unease it might cause. “I hate being the bearer of concerning news on this, but it’s even worse not to tell people that this is coming,” he said. He ended on a note of agency, telling Patel, “We have choices as humans to make about how we shape it.” Despite claiming not to be an AI doomer seeking control of the technology, Gates warned last month that AI could cause a billion deaths: NBC released excerpts Friday of Gates’s interview with Kristen Welker, set to air Sunday. In it, the Microsoft co-founder said, “AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths.” Gates went further, describing the danger of AI falling into the wrong hands. “Even though it’s pretty hard to get to 100%, there’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools,” he told Welker. Major players in AI are jockeying for position in the AI race, including attempts to control potential government regulation of the technology. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world. Read more at People here. Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.