Bill Gates airs concerns of AI dominance over humans in the future
In a Jan. 2024 article of ASI, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates declared his predictions on the future impact of AI on healthcare, education, and the workforce. He considered the new technology as “revolutionary.” He would even find the Microsoft Copilot most useful when he would spend a lot of time in meetings as part of his ongoing work in public health and artificial intelligence.
“I’d say the feature I use the most is the meeting summary, which is integrated into [Microsoft] Teams, which I use a lot,” Gates said in an interview with The Verge. “The ability to interact and not just get the summary, but ask questions about the meeting, is pretty fantastic.” For him, each meeting contains a lot of material to digest after the fact — a task he says AI is well suited to assist with.
Today and a year later, the recent advances in AI development, have him pondering what humans’ lives might be like in a not-so-distant future dominated by machines. Gates made his frightening predictions about an AI-led world during an appearance on the Jimmy Fallon’s late night talk show in early February 2025. “The era that we’re just starting is that intelligence is rare, you know, a great doctor, a great teacher,” Gates said. “And with AI, over the next decade, that will become free and commonplace. Great medical advice, great tutoring.”
“And it’s profound because it solves all these specific problems, like we don’t have enough doctors or mental health professionals, but it brings with it so much change.” Gates questioned whether people will even have to work the traditional five-day, 40-hour work week that’s been the norm in America since the late 1930s. “Should we just work two or three days a week?” he asked. “So, I love the way it’ll drive innovation forward, but I think it’s a little bit unknown if we’ll be able to shape it. And so, legitimately, people are like “wow, this is a bit scary.” It’s completely new territory.” Gates is aware of AI’s potential to usurp the human race more than most, as he signed an open letter in 2023 that claimed AI is a societal-scale risk on the level of pandemics and nuclear war. Other prominent signatories from the AI industry included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis.
Fallon then asked the question that was likely on everyone’s mind: “I mean, will we still need humans?” “Uh, not for most things,” Gates said, prompting Fallon to put his hands up to his mouth in shock. “Really?!” Fallon said. “Well, we’ll decide. You know, baseball. We won’t want to watch computers play baseball,” Gates said. “There will be some things we’ll reserve for ourselves.”
Miquel Noguer Alonso, the founder of the Artificial Intelligence Finance Institute, shared a very similar sentiment to Gates in an interview with DailyMail.com. “What is fun is to have two humans playing chess, or two humans playing football or baseball,” said Alonso, a professor at Columbia University’s engineering department. But in Gates’ estimation, AI will increasingly be used to increase productivity to heights that were once thought to be impossible.
