Bill Gates, long regarded as one of technology's leading optimists, issued a strikingly sober warning Wednesday about artificial intelligence, arguing in a nearly 6,000-word essay that governments and societies are not adequately preparing for the sweeping disruptions AI will bring to employment, security and human relationships.

"Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history," the Microsoft co-founder and Gates Foundation chair wrote in the essay, published Wednesday on his website. "Right now, we are not preparing for it. I don't see evidence that leaders, experts and communities are confronting the challenges adequately. There is no plan to ease the entry into the AI era."

Gates framed the stakes of the moment in stark, binary terms. "AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice," he wrote, according to Fortune, which had reviewed the essay ahead of publication. He argued that which outcome ultimately materializes depends heavily on choices made by governments, institutions and business leaders now, rather than in the years ahead.

On the question of jobs, Gates argued that AI represents a fundamentally different kind of technological disruption than earlier revolutions, because unlike previous innovations that simply created new categories of work requiring human thought, AI can perform much of that cognitive work directly. Earlier transformations, such as the long historical shift away from agricultural labor, unfolded slowly enough that workers and institutions had time to gradually adapt. Gates predicted that fields including law, medicine, customer service, software development and manufacturing would........

© International Business Times