alt Hacker NewsHe is planning to leverage AI with significant capital expenditures:
> The Gates Foundation has 19 years left of the 20 years in which it will spend its remaining $200 billion. AI will help it achieve its ambitious goals by both accelerating the discovery of vaccines and medicines for HIV, TB, malaria, and malnutrition and helping the healthcare workforce and patients know how to use those tools. The foundation’s goals include cutting the number of children who die every year in half again, as was done from 2000 to 2024. All of our work, not just health but also agriculture and education, will take full advantage of AI.
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I think "maintaining the working poor" is a strange misread of "give people jobs". His point is that people get a ton of meaning out of their work in our current capitalist system, and regardless of whether or not we change our system in the long term, if we don't do something about jobs in the short term, there will be a civil crisis:
> In a capitalist society, employment is the way most people get the money they need to pay for the basics of life as well as being a key source of dignity and social connection.
> When a community has high unemployment, the ripple effects can be pervasive. Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses. Now imagine similar pressures on both white-collar and blue-collar workers nationwide.
> Waiting until people are already displaced or underemployed will be too late. AI is a structural challenge to the way our economy is organized, and it requires thinking and action now.
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I still think there is a contradiction he glossed over. In a capitalist society, jobs have a dual role that is sometimes paradox: For workers and employees, jobs are a source of income, skill, status and participation; for the (capitalist) state, a job is often a justification why the worker deserves to exist. But for the employer, jobs are a cost center and expenditure that should be minimized - that was why this tech was developed in the first place.
The state papers over that contradiction with the idea of perpetual economic growth, where the economic activity simply grows so fast that more jobs are created than are lost by efficiency improvements.
Gates is somehow expecting that "we" (whoever that is) agree just like that to keep certain jobs from being replaced by AI, even if they could. But that would go against all the forced and incentives that make up the dynamic of the current system.
Ending poverty is a purely mechanical problem, with very straightforward solutions if you have robots that can do any mechanical task. You don't need to give anyone a job, you just need to give them food and shelter. (Ideally also medicine, but it sounds like that part at least he's thinking about, although again, perhaps not for anyone who doesn't already have it.)
Curing diseases and making people feel fulfilled are great goals, but they're not the primary ones in my mind. They are in Gates' mind because those are the biggest challenges he has personally experienced in his life.
Making the structural changes to our economy should be trivial if AI works as well as he's supposing it will. We won't need an economy at all, not to solve the problems caused by unemployment. (And that's the thing, is unemployment is not the actual problem, it is a cause of problems, but AGI would give us easy alternatives to the fundamentally unattainable goal of full employment.)