A Billion People. Now What?

It's the kind of news that makes you want to pull the covers over your head.

This week, I’m forcing myself out of bed to think—and learn—about “The Human Problem” of AI, if only to safeguard my own sanity and optimism.

So, here goes.

Bill Gates says artificial intelligence is powerful enough to drive events that could cause a billion deaths.

A billion.

This isn't coming from someone who has spent his career warning that technology will destroy civilization. Quite the opposite. Gates has long argued that innovation can solve some of humanity's most difficult problems.

Which is why his warning got my attention.

Before we start building bunkers, though, it's worth understanding what he actually said.

Gates isn't predicting that a billion people are going to die. He's talking about what becomes possible when increasingly powerful AI gets into the hands of people who intend to do harm—biological attacks, cyberattacks and other threats AI could make dramatically easier to execute.

But that's only part of it.

Gates describes AI as something closer to an evolutionary event than another technological revolution. AI isn't simply giving humans a better tool. It's beginning to perform the thing we've historically reserved for ourselves: cognition.

It can reason, learn, write, code, diagnose, design and analyze. And it's getting better extraordinarily quickly.

That's what Gates means when he says we've never faced anything quite like this.

Previous technological revolutions displaced certain kinds of work while creating others. The tractor replaced agricultural labor, but humans moved into factories and offices. Computers automated tasks, but we still needed people to interpret information and make decisions.

AI potentially changes that equation because it can increasingly perform the cognitive work we moved humans into.

So where does that leave us?

I keep coming back to human judgment.

AI can give me an answer, but I still have to decide whether it's a good one. It can create a brand strategy, but it doesn't sit across the table from a nervous CEO and notice what isn't being said. It can analyze thousands of customer comments, but recognizing why one seemingly insignificant comment matters still requires something more.

Context. Curiosity. Empathy. Taste. Experience.

Ironically, the more extraordinary artificial intelligence becomes, the more important those very ordinary human qualities may become.

Gates isn't arguing that we should stop AI. He believes it could transform medicine, education and standards of living. His warning is that something this powerful can't simply be released with the assumption that we'll figure out the consequences later.

AI is already here.

The question is what we humans decide to do with it.

Because we may be creating something faster than we're creating the rules—and perhaps even the wisdom—to manage it.

And that's what I'm going to spend this week thinking about.

The Human Problem.