Bill Gates is concerned Artificial Intelligence might become evil, but could it ever be more evil than the young Bill Gates? No such algorithm exists!

The former Dear Leader of the authoritarian state known as Microsoft, now a sweater-clad, avuncular philanthropist, is excited about where machine intelligence is headed in the near-term future but knows both Weak AI (which is happening) and Strong AI (which theoretically could) pose challenges. 

From Ina Fried at Recode:

After years of working on the building blocks of speech recognition and computer vision, Gates said enough progress has been made to ensure that in the next 10 years there will be robots to do tasks like driving and warehouse work as well as machines that can outpace humans in certain areas of knowledge. 

“The dream is finally arriving,” Gates said, speaking with wife Melinda Gates on Wednesday at the Code Conference. “This is what it was all leading up to.”

However, as he said in an interview with Recode last year, such machine capabilities will pose two big problems.

The first is, it will eliminate a lot of existing types of jobs. Gates said that creates a need for a lot of retraining but notes that until schools have class sizes under 10 and people can retire at a reasonable age and take ample vacation, he isn’t worried about a lack of need for human labor.

The second issue is, of course, making sure humans remain in control of the machines.•