Bill Gates’s Blunt Warning on A.I.

28:49Eggs from hens trapped in cages so small, they can't even spread their wings. Mariano's pledged to go 100 % cage-free, but continues to profit from cage cruelty and our stolen trust. Chicago deserves better. Learn the truth and hold Mariano's accountable at marianosunmasked.com. That's marianosunmasked.com. There's another layer of risk that your essay talks quite a bit about, that AI really will take jobs from people. Now, I know a lot of people debating this who say, no, the jobs are too messy. There was a prediction we'd have no more radiologists. We still have radiologists. AI can code, but we still have coders and strong demand for coders.

29:36So tell me about why you think AI really will take jobs away from human beings at a significant scale. Yeah, so there's no doubt to date AI has created more jobs than it's destroyed. The demand for the skill sets, even just to build the data centers, is very, very high. We have a reasonably low unemployment rate. The superiority of these systems is subject to a threshold where you have to believe that it's incredibly reliable. You know, if you're going to have your telesales or telesupport capability be AI driven, you want to make sure that its accuracy is better than humans. And so the only profession we've truly crossed over that threshold is coding.

30:32And even there, I know a lot of people who are, you know, kind of stuck in the past and, you know, don't want to use the AI for coding. But managers of coders get that most applications can be developed very inexpensively. We will, in the next few years, cross over those thresholds for accounting, legal work, telesales, telesupport, where 24 hours a day in every language with infinite trivia capability and no urgency. So you look at the AI nurse, and there's several companies. They have perfect memory. They don't hurry to get up. It'd be like a nurse you would call on the phone or talk to through a chat interface.

31:17Far preference. You go to San Francisco and ask people, would you rather ride in a Waymo or rather ride with a human driver? Go ask people in the UK who use Limbic for mental health support. You know, so the notion that just the market demand preference for driving or the nurse, you know, or even the person on the phone will favor humans, that's a quality threshold which will be passed through. So if, say, insurance companies are still doing human-stew claims, medical claims, which is a very AI-capable task, then a competitor who has very few human employees will come in and change the pricing model for that industry.

32:05So the two counter arguments I've heard people make on this, one is that you have a Jevons paradox effect where the cheaper, more widespread availability of this kind of intelligence leads to a massive increase in the demand for this kind of thing. So yes, you have many more AI chatbot nurses, and that leads to more people being sent to the hospital, being sent to the doctor where real nurses take care of them, or you have many more AI coders. So maybe my small podcast team, which wouldn't have had a software engineer before, now has one because it's like they run a team of coders and we can build products we never thought of before.

32:42this is the most common answer i hear to this that yes ai will destroy jobs yes it is making a human provided resource much cheaper but because it's going to expand the demand so much it will sort of work itself out create jobs in other areas create new demand and this is how past technologies have gone and so we shouldn't worry too much about this how do you see that Well, Jevons is just a referral to the fact that parts of the economy are subject to demand elasticity. And yes, in the case of software, if you're, say, three times as fast and there is still some role that only humans can perform, then as you lower the cost, you induce demand.

33:24And so it's fair to say that the equilibrium today for software is not a loss of employment. When you invent radial tires that last four times as long, for some weird reason, people didn't drive four times as much. And factories that make tires employ a quarter as many people. When you replace people in Amazon warehouses with robots, people don't buy more because of that. So, you know, anybody who's numeric can say to themselves, what portion of the economy is subject to demand elasticity? And what are those tasks that will still be human necessary? As soon as you complete the entire task, it doesn't matter that there's demand elasticity.

34:10That goes into the token budget. It doesn't go into the human salary budget. The cost for some of these things is so much less than the cost of the human labor. And so as you cross reliability thresholds, both with white collar and humanoid robots, you destroy jobs and you leave no high ground. That's innovation in the past. You have a tractor, fine. Let's build Disneyland and employ a lot of people there. You don't have that in the broad economy. People who say there'll be net additional jobs, I don't understand what they're thinking. They must not understand the pace of improvement we're on that, you know, the reliability.

34:56You wrote a column, I think, was in May that I looked at it like, what? What? You disagreed with my column. What is this unique humanness thing that you think, you know, in every category where AIs come along, the preference for the AI is very, very strong. So that column was based on, so Jevon's paradox, and then the other, which is an argument from Alex Imus. who I believe is now at one of the labs as an economist, is that you will have this sort of explosion in the relational sector. One thing that happens when people get wealthier, and you'd probably know about this, is that they all of a sudden get a lot more human help, right?

35:34They have personal trainers and chefs, and there's a lot more. No? I don't know. I see a lot more people around you. Royalty used to have a lot of human help. You had upstairs, downstairs, all those maids and people. And you used to have a human who helped you get dressed. Believe me, the labor intensity of wealth is down super dramatically. From what it used to be. So you don't - And Jevons Paradox, name a blue collar profession that's subject to Jevons Paradox or do you not care about blue collar? I do care about blue collar. So the question is you - Name anything in the blue collar realm that's subject to that.

36:05So I'm not, I don't have the strongest view on this, but here's, I think the argument that I would make or that I've heard made is that if you look at something like manufacturing, we've not had a Jevons Paradox in manufacturing employment in America, right? We exploded how much we actually create, but a lot of the jobs went offshore. Some of the jobs went to automation. But we don't have less total employment in America than we did in 1960. And the reason is people moved into service sector jobs that the composition of jobs across the economy changed. Yeah, human cognition became the scarce element.

36:38It's always about scarce elements. Once you replace human cognition as a scarce element, in fact, you blow it away in terms of working 24 hours a day, reading more, knowing every language, there is no scarcity that you're moving up to. So you feel there is no scarcity that will be left for human beings here? Alex would say it's something like relational sector jobs, but you don't believe there are enough of those. Of the current jobs, you mean like my relationship with a cab driver or my relationship with that nurse where I'd rather have Hippocratic AI call me? I think the question here is actually, do you end up preferring Hippocratic AI Or do you actually want your therapist to be a human being?

37:17Because after a little while, there's something thin about telling your problems to a computer. Well, you can gather market data if that's at all interesting. I suppose telling the 55-year-old truck driver you're going to go do some relational thing, you have a program for that? I don't have a program for it. And I think the question you actually run into very quickly is speed of transition, even if you believed some of this. and I said this in the column too, that I don't see how you will handle the speed of transition, that our actual experience with fast transition of jobs is that people lost their jobs lose out.

37:55Now you might over the entire economy, it doesn't look that different, but say the China shock did lead to a lot of ruined communities. So your answer to this, and it leads to a very concrete idea for you, which is that we should tax the use of AI. Why and how? Well, let's say workers pay in on a pay-as-you-go basis into the pension Social Security fund, so active workers are supporting retired workers. If you let go of a worker and hire a robot to do that job, why are you so incenting the trade-off against the human labor that you don't ask the robot to also pay into the pension fund. What is it?

38:40You know, is it the pro-robot union has gotten the tax laws to say, no, if you're not flesh, then let pensions go bankrupt, which, you know, they're on a path to do even without robot replacement. So how would we do that? You say, you define a unit of labor and say, independent of whether that's delivered by human or robot, you are paying the same FICA tax that a human worker would pay. Now, that loan's not enough, but, you know, why should we be so favorable to taking away that job? The current tax structure is very much as though people who have capital are what really counts and labor is the most disadvantaged input to the economy.

39:28Society gets to decide just because the economic signals say that it'd be lower cost to use an AI doesn't mean society has to do that. The other one you propose is human reserve jobs. Tell me what you mean by that. So there's a question, particularly as you get the impacts on the blue-collar stuff, which that's very sharp because, you know, when the humanoid robots pass a certain threshold, they are very general purpose. But the idea here is that you would decide in advance that things like child care or elder care or some portion of medical care, some portion of education, although you could have some AI enhancement, that you would maintain the employment and call those things human reserved.

40:20I found this vision not totally unconvincing, but chilling. I think the way you put it in the piece was that this feels a little bit to you like nature reserves, places where we could put buildings and roads, but we choose not to because a loss would be so great. And I think it gets to this question that a lot of people have that on one out of every two days I have, which is if this is what it looks like, why do it? The Gates Foundation announced on Monday a five-year goal for an estimated 3.4 billion people who speak languages currently underrepresented in today's AI models to be able to use AI tools in their own language and voice.

41:03And if we are looking at this sort of jobpocalypse, this level of risk, that it's like to have that on the one hand and then on the other hand, like our goal is for more people to use AI. Tell me why. the there are many good things that ai does and that's almost all of the foundation's work is in taking what the market would not do which is take ai to the poorest in the world and help them with education and health and agriculture so if you have a a woman say in nigeria who speaks yoruba She's in a remote community. There's no doctor there. So when she says she's bleeding, AI doesn't get that right.

41:45We're spoiled. We speak English. And that's the thing that Yoruba is 10 times worse than is English, which is significantly the best. There's about 10 other languages that are fairly close. So the empowerment for that woman to be able to talk about her medical problem and get advice in the middle of the night just by having a smartphone with the data connection, that's what we're trying to enable. Okay, but I get that. It's just the picture you just painted of the jobpocalypse. As bad as it might be here, and it will be bad, we do have a fair amount of money. We have the AI companies. We can tax AI companies, put that into redistribution.

42:29But is this not going to wipe out the ladder of mobility, the ladder of development for a lot of these countries? I mean, doesn't this make AI a tremendous economic threat if you're the Philippines? You're saying that are allowing the AI to understand Yoruba and help that woman who's bleeding is a bad thing? I am saying that AI sounds in this telling like a bad thing. That the net net, like, yes, if you're - Supporting the world's languages, how can that be a bad thing? But I think you understand what I'm saying. No, I - The job picture you're putting forward is very scary. I'm trying to accelerate the good stuff AI does.

43:12And I'm trying to minimize - So what do we do about jobs in the global South? Well, treating the global South like one uniform thing doesn't allow you to have any picture of what it's like to live there. There are middle-income countries like China, Brazil, Vietnam, Indonesia, where their economies are growing and their childhood death rate is within a factor of three of the U.S. Then there are low-income countries where 15 times as many children die before the age of five. And you don't have doctors. You live your entire life. You never meet a doctor. You try to figure out what seeds to plant.

43:52You never have anybody advise you what to do. And so, you know, we need a little more nuance. In low-income countries, the AI will overwhelmingly be a good thing. And it should be pushed forward as quickly as it can. So is your argument in some ways actually that it's a better trade for low-income countries? That it has more benefit maybe than it does here? The human basics we're not meeting today. If these people lived on your street, you would open your wallet. You'd be outraged. I mean, these kids are dying. These kids are malnourished. So the inequity is allowed to exist because of the distance.

44:29And AI is a tool for good in terms of helping those people in by far the greatest need with very basic human problems. Do you think it has as much effect on the job markets in some of the poor countries that we're talking about? Not in the same timeframe, no. But over time? Well, if you're talking, see, you probably spend more time in middle-income countries than in low-income countries. I do, that's true. So your image is like Philippines, India, and all of those. Yes, in those countries, they will see the jobs effect after the rich countries. And then eventually, even the low-income countries.

45:06But I guess this gets to the broad engagement question. I don't have a good crystal ball on this. I find the range of outcomes terrifyingly wide. This range, it seems to run from massive material abundance and elimination of want to actually doesn't change all that much to human extinction is a pretty wide range of outcomes to consider. What I hear you saying to me, and you should tell me if I'm getting part of your position wrong here. What I hear you saying to me, you know, convincingly and forcefully, is that the AI jobpocalypse is a very real thing, that mass displacement of workers with no real answer to that is a very real thing.

45:44When you talk about broad societal engagement, I think most Americans, most people in most places, if they heard that and they were convinced of it, right? And polls show most people think AI is going to take jobs and not create them, but they would say, actually, just stop, right? If what you are going to do is make it unclear how me or my family or my children or my friends will have a job, say, in America, please just don't. Let's just stop for now. And so you actually seem to me to have a stronger negative perspective on the jobs question than a lot of people I talk to, even in the labs. You're shaking your head at me.

46:20I do talk to people. I'm not coming from nowhere on this. And definitely than a lot of the economists I talk to. So for whom then is AI a good trade if you believe the job effect is going to be so ruinous for most people. That's funny that when I was telling this to a person who some people consider the lead economist looking at AI, he said, how can Mechanical Turk still exist? How Amazon run that if AI is as good as you said? And I said, it won't. A week later, it was completely shut down. And yes, the suffusion of knowledge from, you have to say, isn't it pretty stunning that the more you know, the more concerned you are.

47:04You know, take Dario. Dario spoke out about job impacts. Now he's a bit more guarded. Hinton, I agree, went too far. And he said, okay, it's coming tomorrow that there'll be less radiologists. And of course there are more today. So we have some of that taking place and we have the analogies with the past where people are saying, well, this is like the PC, not like evolutionary history. This is like evolutionary history. This is like the aliens really are here and, you know, have come. They didn't have to do spacecraft. They were created in laboratories. But that's the kind of thing we're dealing with.

47:46And if we retain control, then eventually you do get, not to overuse the word that you've used, You do get to this superabundance period, and there you have deep, almost philosophical religious issues of if you don't have the shortages that we've organized society around, you know, why you should learn and how you find purpose, then you have deep philosophical religious problems. But you do not have dying of malaria, don't have enough food, don't have access to a doctor problems. And so if we get to that, a younger generation will figure out, okay, how do we live? How do we spend time? That's a very different world than the way we have today.

48:35I think what this generation has to do is make sure we get through that with humanity still in control. and with the disruption, the number of bioterror events or the number of people whose lives are damaged by job loss. We need to minimize that over what's probably a 20-year-plus transition period. So when you say, because this is something you say at the beginning of that essay, that this could be, and I'm paraphrasing, the most powerful driver of inequality or of equality, where what what are the highest leverage for you? Good things that can come out of this. I can imagine somebody listening to our conversation and you're thinking, why the hell would we do this with this set of risks?

49:21Yeah, that's where the timing thing is troubling. You know, whichever definition of abundance you're using, you want to say, oh, my health bill was less than I expected. Oh, I was buying a new house and it was less than I expected. I was renting and they seem to be lowering the rent. But, you know, my electricity. That would be nice. But AI, you know, because of the efficiency and invention that comes with it, that's, you know, what over the 20 year period, you do get kind of mind blowing advances in things that people can relate to the cost of their food, shelter, education. because those are highly regulated areas.

50:08So the good stuff, if we're not careful, arrives more slowly than the biocyber risk, the psychosocial risk, and the jobs risk. Those things in the next five years are very significant. And so people will decide, although it's hard for a single country to check out, people will decide whether to slow down, stop, get rid of AI. uh and you know yes it will have political difficulties stopping data centers isn't going to slow this thing one iota so anybody who's against data centers because they think that'll slow down ai that's a waste of effort now the data centers are going to get built somewhere uh so the broad view of the the technology that has to be expressed in in in some other form i want to get at something you're saying here because something that that i've thought about too, which is that there are a lot of rate limiters, a lot of weak links in the chain.

51:07When you try to take, even in an optimistic view, AI advances that then have to be built in the material world, right? You have an acceleration of good candidates for pharmaceutical development, but you still need to find rats to test on, monkeys to test on, human trials, you have slow regulatory agencies, et cetera. And then you have this tremendous acceleration of intelligence that is, for lack of a better term, native to the digital world and is acting there in a kind of constant way. And I mean, right now you see this, right? You can accelerate AI with very little regulatory overhang, but you cannot get the open AI parking lot covered in solar panels without permits and hearings.

51:49And so I think you have a very high chance of getting into a very weird, both economic and social world, where the digital world is spinning into this other thing. But most of the things human beings need ultimately come out physically, like we need shelter and we need food and we need all this, and they run through institutions. And so a lot of the ways it could actually make our lives better are sort of limited by normal human factors, but a lot of the ways it could make them worse or weirder are not. Well, we definitely need to look at the things that slow down the good stuff. So, for example, because the Gates Foundation is a nonprofit, we can work with regulators on how they use AI to do their job.

52:37And whether it's organoids or biological models, we can speed up that regulatory piece. piece. And there's some countries that are very much engaged in that type of acceleration. The one application that's going full speed ahead and kind of amazed me is the agricultural one, because they're getting better weather data to these farmers in Africa. You know, we have over a million farmers in India already using the system. So it tells them what crop disease they have, what fertilizer to use, what varieties to plant. We've even put a bunch of services they can take advantage of on there. That one is going full speed ahead.

53:23The health and education, you could say, you know, will it be the rich countries, the middle-income countries, or the low-income countries? And they get there first because some of the barriers are different. For the low-income countries, it's not regulatory. It's, you know, is anybody providing the tokens? Do they have the smartphone and the connectivity, which are the basics and the language thing that we've talked about? So they'll proceed at different paces. Ideally, we'll learn from each other. I mean, China actually banned young people having social relationships with AI. Do they know something we don't know?

54:00Can we look at outcomes of different experiments? So there's going to have to be a lot of that learning. But you're right. If the benefits aren't coming quickly, then the permission to operate, particularly if we don't put on the safeguards for the cyber attacks or the bio attacks, this is going to be a very tough issue to stick up for.

54:33Hey, what's up, guys? It's Haley Bailey. Okay, I need to tell you about something. I just got YouTube Premium. It's got tons of awesome features like offline downloads so I can download my favorite videos before I travel and watch them whenever I don't have Wi-Fi because we all know airplane Wi-Fi is the worst. I get ad-free, I get backroom play, and there's like a ton more in there. You should try it. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Try it now for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Hi, I'm Sean Evans from Hot Ones, and I want to tell you about YouTube Premium.

55:09It has offline downloads, so you can watch without Wi-Fi. Background play, so you can lock your phone, and it still plays, baby. Oh, and it is completely ad-free. Yes, I said it, ad-free. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. Trial eligibility varies, terms apply, cancel anytime. time. This podcast is supported by USA Facts. People disagree about a lot in this country, taxes, health care, education. But wherever you land politically, I think most of us agree on this. Better information leads to better decisions. That's the mission of USA Facts, to make government data clear and accessible.

55:51Because public data should be easy to access, trust, and understand, so we can use it to make informed decisions. Read and sign our open letter to support public data at USAFacts.org. When I was preparing for this episode and telling people I was interviewing you, one of the big space of skepticism people now have is around what they've heard with you and Jeffrey Epstein. So I've looked at your past testimony, but what do you say to people who have lost some faith in you and just see you differently just now linking sort of your name and his? You know, they should read what I said to Congress.

56:33I got to answer all the questions. I, in trying to raise money for global health, thought that Epstein could connect me because of his relationship with them. And I had meetings with him. Relationship with whom? With billionaires. But you're a billionaire. I mean, you're the billionaire on some level. I'm giving all my money away. And I spend a lot of time trying to raise money for global health. And so you felt that he had connections that would be of value to you in that? To raise money for global health, yes. That's what that, I mean, did you read it? I did read it. That's all we, that's what we met about.

57:12I mean, other than, okay, there was a dinner with Larry Summers where we talked about the economy. The whole discussion was, is there a chance here to help out? Spending time with him was clearly a mistake. I've changed my bar for even somebody in a non-paid intermediate role. I'll never take any risk on that again because our work is very reputation sensitive. The hole at the center of that story for me is how this guy was so compelling to so many very smart, very wealthy people. I mean, there are a lot of people who want your attention and don't get it. People want Larry Summer's attention and don't get it.

57:52That there's something about Epstein's charisma or the way he presented himself that drew people into at least thinking he could be very useful to them. what was that what like i've read his emails he does not seem like a pleasant person to email with what was the kind of factor about him that allowed him to weave this web that you and so many other people were in well i wasn't in a web i was in discussions about raising money for global health i didn't go to any island or meet any women anyway don't call it a web uh the how he performed the bootstrap of, you know, owning the fanciest house I've ever seen in New York City and having Larry Summers and the number two guy, JP Morgan there.

58:41Uh, you know, so that was an interesting dinner. Uh, even if, if Jeffrey never said a word, I don't know how that bootstrap take, took place. But there were lots of billionaires that he was involved in the moment where you kind of decide, okay, what am I doing with my wealth? How do I minimize taxes? What do I do with my family? That type of thing. And so, you know, that's, I don't think anybody else was drawn in And for that reason, my case is kind of a unique case in that he said, oh, you'll have more money than you'll know what to do with. And eventually I insisted that he take me around to see billionaires.

59:28He had me meet with five. Turned out none of them had a near term intent. And I ended the relationship with him within a month of that. And so the thing he was able to do, because that's interesting to me, is like even for you to walk into the house, it was that fancy. that people around it gave him credibility. And so that he was able to put on a show such that what he was able to offer was of value. There was all this kind of social capital and wealth flowing around him. Some people socialized with him. I did not. Other than, to my surprise, after dinner, magician coming in, David Blaine. I didn't spend one minute socializing with him.

1:00:08He offered, you know, come to the island or, you know, come to some show in Paris. And I said, I would not choose to do that. that would not be a good idea. So then I want to widen back out to the Gates Foundation. You said you're going to spend down its money,$200 billion by 2045. Given everything we've talked about here with AI, how has your vision for how that spending plays out changed? I mean, there's two dramatic things that have happened. One is the incredible AI capabilities, which continues to be an exponential. And the second is the reduction in overall generosity towards the poorest in the world.

1:00:50So I have one piece of enablement, which is we'll discover drugs faster, we'll discover new seeds faster, and that we can talk to those farmers and get them to buy the right seed or talk to the person living with HIV and help them... seek the care they need. So AI can be a big enabler for our goals, including malaria eradication, poli eradication, cutting childhood death in half again. But now the amount of resources available is way less than, you know, sort of a golden rule view of the world would suggest it should be. There is from the foundations connected to Anthropic and OpenAI, the sense of an amount of nonprofit money coming online in the next couple of years that will dwarf sort of any moment in philanthropy before it.

1:01:44I know people in that world, the sense of this being something very unusual is very present. Does that change what's possible here? Be numeric. Take the cuts and overseas aid. I'm not saying it answers the cuts and overseas aid. We save lives for$1 ,000 per year. And so getting less money from philanthropists net doesn't save those lives. The amount of money to save lives at$1 ,000 per life saved will be dramatically less. So when I've looked at the way your foundation is spending on AI, tell me if I have this wrong, it's about 40 % education, 40 % health, 10-ish percent agriculture, and 10-ish percent institutions.

1:02:28Do I have that? I mean, it's a little more in agriculture. Almost nothing we do because we're like a pharmaceutical company inventing new drugs. And do you call that AI or not calling that AI? We didn't put any of that in our billion dollar commitment we announced. We just put in AI specific things like understanding African languages. So tell me a bit about your views on AI and education. This is a place where I've seen a lot of studies now, and they have very, very mixed results depending on how they're used. So where do you think it is valuable and where is it a risk? Well, the contrast between the ambitious goals that the Gates Foundation set in the year 2000 are goals for global health and are goals for education.

1:03:16In global health, we thought, wow, African governments, traditional beliefs, are we going to have any impact at all? Much to my surprise, our work on global health, together with, we create with others, the Global Alliance for Vaccines, we create the Global Fund, President Bush does PEPFAR. You know, a ton of things happen, including primarily vaccines, rotavirus, pneumococcus. And we cut child to death more than in half, from over 10 million a year to under 5 million a year. So we more than exceed any goal we would have set for the field in global health. In education, we thought we could just go see what really great teachers do, videotape that, understand it, create a feedback system for teachers to hear that, improve their practice, you know, constant learning on that, and that we could make education a lot better.

1:04:18As you've just seen from the latest numbers, kids are learning less today in most rich countries, including the United States, than they learned 10 years ago, 20 years ago. So people start appropriately with a very high degree of skepticism. Before we go to AI, tell me why you think that. Those numbers have been very, very striking. Why do you think that is? Why are we seeing learning loss in rich countries? Now I think you've got to have a, not you, but one has to have a broader answer than the pandemic. Oh, it's definitely, we are post-pandemic and people debate, is it the use of cell phones?

1:04:58Is it something to do with affluence overall? There are some outliers.

1:05:07England actually is counter-trend and they went back to basics in terms of how they teach reading as well. And so, you know, high expectations is winning out over just, you know, freeform creativity. But, you know, there's something clearly large in those statistics. It's very concerning. And so you can almost say, why do we continue to do education? Well, education is key. I'm stubborn. We've got AI now. and we have people where the AI is playing a very specific role of each student at the end of the day. This is here in New York City classrooms where they're using a curriculum called KITM, spends less than 10 minutes answering a few questions.

1:06:01And then the teacher's given right away a sense of, okay, which concepts are the kids struggling with? Which ones are struggling with them? How might you organize the classroom? The data on that, which is small scale, are one of these stunning results that make you want to really scale it up. When you scale up an education, you go from the teachers who willingly engage in experiments and are probably self-selected for flexibility to the broad population. And so the number of things in education that look good in the small that either don't affect when you scale up or the quality of implementation degrades so much that the effect is basically washed out.

1:06:49You know, that's the history of education innovation. I do think is AI helps you with motivation. Uh, you know, many of these software tools have helped motivated students, but actually created more of a differential. You know, it's a kid like myself who went home and used Khan Academy for two hours at night. And it's the, you know, the median kid who comes in and sees, wow, he's just, you know, so much better. That's discouraging. That's, you know, probably hurts. So unless you believe in trickle-down or something, this is not equity at work. Can the AI, not only through personalized learning but personalized motivation, overcome that?

1:07:33And I really believe that we can get that right. Well, there's a question here of AI tools that are specifically designed for this. And then a question in the way we were just talking about with cell phones and smartphones and social media of how AI will diffuse through society. And I think the big concern here, and one I have as well, is this, but now it gets called cognitive offloading, that what AI is being used for in mass numbers by students and being really quickly adopted for is, I didn't do the reading, summarize it for me. Or I have to write this essay, draft it for me. Or help me on these math problems.

1:08:10And even I think where we saw a big study out of China that was striking to me, where you saw kids using AI had increases on their homework scores. And then when they had to test outside of that context, their test scores began falling pretty sharply. And so certainly one can imagine AI programs that'll be good here. But in terms of a technology and a way of interacting with the world, diffusing through society, well, of course, it could help people learn linear algebra or whatever it might be. Then in practice, what it's going to do is people will be using it to help them and, you know, both from the student level and up through, you know, the professional level, beginning to degrade the learning, the creativity that happens with the hard work of drafting and struggling and challenging yourself.

1:08:59Yeah, well, you clearly would get by modality where a student can use AI to be lazy and corrupt the measurement system, uh, or a student can use AI to help them learn more. I have to say in terms of my learning about subjects, this is the best time of my life. I mean, I take YouTube videos and put them into the chat. I have AIs talk with each other. What a nirvana. You know, I always had the ability to send mail to somebody like Nathan Mirvold who knows physics. Well, now I discuss the physics thing with the AI, you know, I get to it. And then if it's a super important decision, like I'm going to invest a billion dollars, I'll send it to Nathan and say, could you look this over?

1:09:48But 24 hours a day, keeping up to date on the latest malaria thing or vaccine thing. So that bimodality is going to be there. And it really does go back to this motivational part of it. Is that a place where there should be more limits on the systems? I mean, you mentioned a few minutes ago China, which for all we talk about, it'd be impossible for us to strike a deal with them. China currently has stronger national level regulations on AI than we do, including things like on social companionship for kids. One of the places that you talk about in the essay where maybe we want to be more aggressive is around children.

1:10:28And that's a place where I think it is reasonable for the government to be paternalistic. We should be paternalistic. and social media always feels to me like an experiment we ran on kids a lot of the internet does and i don't so much mind us running the experiment on adults but i wonder if we want to be more aggressive in what we don't let kids do with ai until we have a better sense of how it affects everything from learning relationships to uh you know trying to make it harder to have ai help you cheat on your homework? Yeah, I don't think a black and white ban is necessary because I do think with monitoring, which I'm kind of broken record on that, that making sure it's staying within the bounds of what's appropriate, what the parent wants, our capabilities there are very strong.

1:11:27There are many systems that try to help instead of telling you the answer, they engage with you on how do you reason through the problem. And so then the question is, can you make sure the student isn't going to those outside systems and just getting the answer? Instead, they're engaged in the system that brings them along step by step in that reasoning process so that they'll be more capable the next time. And so, yes, seeing what that student is doing and deciding, okay, do you call in a psychiatrist? Do you call in the parents? A lot of these systems, the idea of monitoring will be very important.

1:12:12And at different ages, the visibility of the parent about what's going on and how time is being spent, at, say, some very young age, a parent probably should have complete visibility into the exact dialogue that the student's engaged in. As the child gets older, are there things about sexual identity or things that really it's beneficial for that to at some level be private or not. I think there's a lot of tuning to go on with this. One of the partners, the foundation's working with this, Common Sense Media, who did a very good job on this TV show or this movie, what it exposes you to, is a much tougher area.

1:13:07Most of these systems that have been set up with parental control, the parent's lack of technical sophistication is such that it doesn't really matter that you try to engage the parent. Nothing happens. You know, in my case, I didn't know that my daughter had a second cell phone. So that, you know, it's a fairly straightforward way that she, in late hours, was able to stay on social networking when I hoped that she would be sleeping. And so we have to be realistic about how these things are designed. People will worry about the privacy issues there. That's fine. You know, I believe we can make them.

1:13:47It's not an argument for being unmonitored in terms of what your kid is doing. So next two years in politically, you have the midterms coming up, then you'll have a presidential election in 2028. So if this were to go, not just in terms of passing laws the way you wanted to, but because you sort of center your call on this coming together of society to discuss, debate, respond, what are you actually envisioning here? So I'd have two metrics. One is the obvious safeguards to minimize the cyber and bio risk. And then the second would be the nature of the dialogue. If the dialogue ends up being one party is for AI and the other party's against, you know, then we'll have like climate change, which is not a great place to be.

1:14:38You don't have room for debate when you only have the two extremes. And the default case, at least right at the moment, seems to be very little middle ground about how we should manage AI. Let's say that a very different administration and a very different composition of political power exists in 2029, and there's interest in rebuilding American foreign aid. What would your advice be on how to build it back so it's effective, so the American people understand what they're getting for that spending, and so it's actually doing good? Yeah. So if you ask the American people what portion of the budget's going to help people in poor countries, it's generally more than 5%.

1:15:29You know, people say 10, 15%. So the fact that it was a half a percent and now it's going down towards a quarter of a percent, that would be pretty shocking to people. understanding that the money is well spent, that it really does save millions of lives, that made every bit of difference in terms of HIV and malaria and TB and maternal survival. They should hear what they should be proud of that even at that half a percent level, you know, a moral argument will be made. It'll be made in the face of an overall debt level that'll be very tough. And whatever safety network needs to be done because of AI impacts, that that will be competing for those dollars.

1:16:21Then always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? Well, when I literally binged this weekend was The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. That's fiction, very touching, very upbeat. Apropos of what we just discussed, uh there's a one called into the wood chipper by nicholas enrick uh which talks about how uh somebody didn't go to a party one weekend and they decided instead to put usa id uh into the wood chipper uh about a month ago i read the infinity machine by sebastian maliby uh ai book Yeah, history of Demas Hacibus and DeepMind. But you get a sense of the whole founding of the AI industry does an incredible job.

1:17:12Bill Gates, thank you very much. Thank you.

1:17:52Thank you. used Outsystems to build a multi-agent system that analyzes blueprints, and a global bank cut their development time by 60%. Own your agentic future today at Outsystems.com slash NYT.