'The key thing is that the good guys have better AIs than the bad guys' says Microsoft founder Bill Gates on the threat from artificial intelligence

In an interview on Leading, a podcast from Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, co-hosts of The Rest is Politics, Microsoft and Gates Foundation co-founder Bill Gates talks about his perception of the dangers of AI.

«The key thing is that the good guys have better AIs than the bad guys,» Gates says. «The issues is not the AIs getting out of control, it's AIs by people with ill intent being more powerful.»

«Just take cyber defence. If the good guys' cyber defence AI is as good or better than the bad guys' cyber attack AI, then that's a good situation. And you're not going to stop development of AI globally. Somebody can argue that maybe you should try and do that and create a world army to go around and invade computer labs, but not many people are pushing on that. And so you're going to have these increasingly powerful AIs that hopefully the good guys stay ahead on.»

Gates won't name and shame who he believes to be a bad guy or a good guy in this analogy, though he does call out Russia's instigation of an attack against Ukraine. Otherwise, Gates hopes most countries are planning to work sensibly with AI.

«Hopefully most countries want to see this stuff shaped appropriately,» Gates says.

Though Gates also notes during the episode that individual countries have less to do with the shaping of AI. This, Gates says, is due to the government market for AI being much, much smaller than the business and consumer markets. 

Previous watershed technologies, including the birth of microprocessors, which was a big driving factor behind Gates' early success at Microsoft, were massively government funded in their early days.

«Governments have a challenge in that they aren't the early people who funded it [AI]. If you actually go way back 20 or 30 years ago, it was government research money, but now it's the Google, Microsoft, etc. The R&D money is huge.»

Gates still works closely with Microsoft, which has teamed up with the AI software market leader, OpenAI. Gates talks to that