Bill Gates compared artificial intelligence with nuclear weapons

Microsoft's co-founder billionaireNow philanthropist Bill Gates considers artificial intelligence to be a very unusual and controversial technology that can both help humanity and harm it. At the conference of the Stanford Institute of Anthropocentric Artificial Intelligence (Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence), Gates drew an analogy between artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons. According to him, people should develop AI technologies in more peaceful spheres, for example, in education and medicine, otherwise misfortune can wait for all of us.

"There were not so many technologies in the worldboth promising and very dangerous, ”said Gates at the conference, mentioning the energy of the atom as one of the positive examples of useful technology that was soon overshadowed by the appearance of nuclear weapons based on it. At the same time, he complained that in those areas where AI could be of real benefit to humanity, there are very few real results so far. In his opinion, medicine and education are those areas where AI could really help people.

“This is a chance to bring social sciences to a new level, starting everything from the most important thing - education,” said the billionaire, who has been expressing excitement over the risks associated with AI for many years.

The rooted pace of development of artificialintelligence, supported by the technology of neural networks that imitate the work of the human brain, has already revolutionized the technological field. Now AI and neural networks are used everywhere: from biometric systems of identification of people, and ending with anti-spam filters for email. However, Gates does not want only the technological giants like Amazon, Google and Facebook to enjoy the benefits that artificial intelligence can provide.

As one of the positive examplesuse of AI in medicine, he led the work of a private American biotechnology company 23andMe, which is engaged in the analysis of genetic data. According to Gates, the use of artificial intelligence made it possible to determine the relationship between the lack of selenium (necessary for the life of the microelement) in the body and the cases of premature birth in women in Africa. Over the next 18 months, researchers will find out whether the therapy program adopted on this issue can be projected to help more than 20,000 African women.

“It is expected that the measures taken should reduce the level of premature births by about 15 percent, which, in general, will save about 80,000 lives for only one Africa,” Gates added.

With regard to education, Gates hopes that the AI ​​can help develop more effective approaches to learning.

“Unfortunately, we are now practically ignoringmotivational aspects of education. We are not trying to develop programs aimed at increasing students' interest and involvement in learning, we are not exploring issues related to new teaching methods. But all this can help us improve our educational system, as well as reduce the percentage of students who decide to drop out of school, ”Gates commented.

Speaking at the conference, Gates also noted that the United States had almost lost the technological gap from other countries in the development of artificial intelligence technologies:

“The United States held a unique position in matters of most of these breakthrough technologies. However, now the leadership of our country is becoming less obvious, ”said Gates.

According to him, after 10 years, the United States may takethe role of catching up, since leading scientific studies aimed at understanding, for example, the same benefits of using AI in the fields of biology and medicine will no longer be carried out in America.

He also noted that today's internal mechanisms of operation of AI-systems are obscure.

“The opacity of most current projects aimed at developing and developing deep machine learning systems is very disturbing,” Gates commented.

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