‘A billion deaths’: Bill Gates warns about AI in the wrong hands, saying a kill switch and self-regulation won’t be enough

Bill Gates once heralded the age of AI as an optimist, writing in July 2023 that “the risks of AI are real but manageable.” But three years later, the Microsoft cofounder and the onetime world’s richest man is warning that bad actors can use the technology to kill on a mass scale. 

“AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that cause a billion deaths,” Gates said in a Meet the Press interview on Sunday. “There’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools.”

Gates has emerged as a thought leader on biological threats, dating back to years before ChatGPT came out, warning that the world was unprepared for a fast-spreading illness such as Ebola in a 2015 TED Talk and then writing How to Prevent the Next Pandemic after COVID-19 immobilized governments’ response systems. This instinct was evident as he talked to the New York Times’ Ezra Klein on Tuesday about his concern that AI is particularly dangerous with regard to biological weapons. 

“A.I. has crossed the threshold that its ability to empower a bioterrorist to kill hundreds of........

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