During a podcast last week with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, billionaire tech magnate Bill Gates suggested the idea of a “global government” in order to prevent potential misuses of artificial intelligence.
In the previous week’s installment of the Microsoft founder’s podcast “Unconfuse Me,” Gates said to Altman, “You’d almost want global government if the key is to stop the entire world from doing something dangerous.”
The two tech titans had a deep conversation about the need for AI technology regulation and the provision of tools to government officials to carry it out.
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In previous years, U.S. government officials lacked knowledge of social media and how to regulate that tech landscape, according to Gates and Altman. As a result, they acknowledged that education and collaboration on the new AI frontier are critical to preventing it from going out of control.
“I don’t think we could ever say we did too much to draw the politicians in,” Gates said to his guest. However, when they say, “Oh, we blew it on social media, we should do better,” that presents an exceptional challenge with a great deal of polarization. I’m still unsure of how we would handle that.
“I don’t understand why the government was not able to be more effective around social media, but it seems worth trying to understand as a case study for what they’re going to go through now with AI,” replied Altman. After that, Gates questioned what new laws might need to be passed by the government in order to deal with AI. Altman suggested that one such law might involve a “global regulatory body.”
“I believe we’re beginning to understand that. It would be very simple to overregulate this area, according to Altman. “But if we are right, and this technology goes as far as we think it’s going to go, it will impact society, geopolitical balance of power, so many things, that for these, still hypothetical, but future extraordinarily powerful systems… we have been socialized in the idea of a global regulatory body that looks at those super-powerful systems, because they do have such global impact.”
