Bill Gates warned on Sunday that unregulated artificial intelligence poses a growing threat and predicted an escalation of AI-based cyberattacks in the coming year.
The Microsoft co-founder said the risk of AI “spinning out of control” was several years away and stressed that the immediate concern was that “bad people” were using existing systems without safeguards.
“The front we’ll probably see most dramatically next year will be cyberattacks,” Gates said in an interview with ABC News.
“The real danger right now is not that AI is going out of control. We need to work on it, but it will take years to know the major impact it could have,” he said.
“It’s really bad people using AI, especially in the AI space where you can remove all safeguards,” he said, adding that increased restrictions were needed to prevent bad actors from using AI for bioterrorism and cyberattacks.
“But right now, you’re allowed to remove all those protections. So when you have bad people, no protections, and then the latest models, that’s where over the next year, primarily in the cyber domain, we’re going to have a lot of negative surprises,” he told ABC.
Gates – who warned in a lengthy article in August that the world was dangerously unprepared for the upheavals wrought by AI, particularly in jobs – is the latest tech mogul to sound the alarm about the threats posed by the new technology.
In his interview on Sunday, he rejected the idea – championed by US President Donald Trump – that self-regulation by AI companies would be enough to keep the world safe.
“The idea that for the most dangerous technology ever invented by man, this is the last word, that only the companies themselves are the only control that society has…it’s clear that we’re not doing enough,” Gates said.
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