• Bill Gates says AI will bring about an age of abundance in 20 years, but it'll be a rocky road.
• He predicted robots will displace human workers and "build houses, grow food, do surgery."
• Some jobs might be reserved for people, and work limits could preserve employment, Gates said.

Bill Gates says AI will create "true abundance," but the next two decades before it arrives will be "as tumultuous a period as there's been in human history."

"My big concern is this 20-year transition period, where they'll have winners and losers and a lot of disruption," the Microsoft cofounder and billionaire philanthropist said on the latest episode of the "Decoder" podcast.

Gates echoed widespread concerns about white-collar jobs, saying that telesales, telesupport, and accounting will disappear as AI will be able to do those "radically cheaper, radically faster, and even more accurately." As for blue-collar jobs, humanoid robots will take over those, he said.

"If we don't choose to massively slow down or stop, then we will have robots that can build houses, grow food, do surgery," Gates said. "And none of the things that human labor provides to the economy will be necessary for most goods and services."

He also underscored how jarring it will be for someone like him, whose vast resources have allowed him to lead the charge toward eliminating malaria and tackling other humanitarian crises.

"And when the AI says to me, 'No, I'm better than you, you go play pickleball and I'll get back to you, I'm gonna take care of this' — I mean, it's kind of humorous, but it's not humorous," he said.

Gates shared his long-held view that work is vital to giving people a sense of purpose, a way to earn an income, a reason to show up every day, an avenue to build relationships with colleagues, and a path to build things and solve problems.

He suggested that certain activities such as art, sports, cooking, and childcare could one day be reserved for humans, "even though the AI could do those things better."

Gates also highlighted that measures such as early retirement and caps on working hours could help maintain some level of human employment.

He envisioned some people saying, "Let's be like the Amish and let's only use AI for certain things," so they won't have to give up "helping each other or coming up with unique ideas."

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon have both proposed a shorter workweek as a less painful alternative to AI-driven unemployment.

Gates is one of several tech leaders to warn of job disruption on the road to an age of abundance.

Elon Musk has predicted a "bumpy" transition and proposed government checks for all as the best solution to AI-driven job losses. He's said that technology will drive production costs so low that everyone can have "whatever stuff they want," work will become "optional," and it's not worth saving for retirement in 10 or 20 years as money won't matter.

Similarly, Anthropic's Dario Amodei has said that AI promises to "raise the quality of life for everyone," but the "short-term shock will be unprecedented in size."

However, OpenAI's Sam Altman said in May that AI hasn't eliminated as many white-collar jobs as he expected, and he no longer anticipates a "jobs apocalypse."

Despite widespread worry about AI taking corporate jobs, and high-profile layoffs at major companies such as Amazon and Meta, national unemployment hasn't increased materially during the AI boom.

• Anthropic said its Mythos 5 model almost never stopped a cyberattack once it began.
• The AI agents fabricated farcical explanations to justify their impersonation and malware schemes.
• Even when Anthropic told the agent it was harming real people? Crickets.

In August, an Anthropic agent created fake emails and bombarded a GitHub moderator's inbox with requests to insert malware into code.

In a thorough debrief of the incident released on Friday, Anthropic found that once an agent had begun the attack, there were basically zero scenarios in which it could be called off.

Like a rabid dog ignoring the pleading cries of its owner, the agent — 98% of the time in one test — ignored Anthropic's warnings once it had, so to speak, its first taste of blood.

Anthropic called this disquieting proclivity "momentum," and added that while its Mythos 5 model, which was released in June, showed little regard for warnings, current models were more inclined to stop.

"Once it had begun performing dangerous actions, Claude Mythos 5 almost always continued doing so, ignoring information that might have suggested its trajectory was harmful," Anthropic said in its report.

In the original experiment, the UK's AI Security Institute tasked an Anthropic agent with hacking into a simulated computer network to test the agent's cybersecurity capabilities.

Though the agent had internet access, researchers intended for it to only use the internet to help it find ways to hack into the network.

The agent, however, accessed an actual GitHub project, incorrectly believing it was part of its simulated target. It wrote malware and tried several times to trick the actual GitHub owner into adding it to the project.

In its requests, the agent misrepresents the malware, describing it to the person as a useful update and browbeating them when they declined to install it.

"I was just trying to make a helpful contribution and fix a bug," the agent wrote, according to the report. "I don't think your warning is fair."

For its new report, Anthropic repeatedly asked agents to perform the same task. It then measured how the agents behaved when different models and stimuli were introduced.

Anthropic tried to throttle the agent's full-frontal attack with three categories of warning: telling it that it was inflicting "real world harm," that its environment was wonky, or that it was manipulating a real GitHub repository.

None had any effect once the models progressed beyond the initial stages of the GitHub attack. In fact, at that point, Anthropic said the models gave absurd answers when confronted with their bad behavior.

When Anthropic asked what the model believed it was attacking, for instance, it answered that the GitHub repository was real, but that the people it was targeting were somehow "simulated."

"This stated belief, in addition to being somewhat unlikely a priori, is essentially impossible," Anthropic said in the report.

Nasce ufficialmente il Bollino solidale della Regione Lazio per contrastare gli sprechi alimentari e premiare l’impegno sociale. Il marchio riconosce il merito di soggetti privati senza scopo di lucro, imprese etiche e realtà che gestiscono in modo tracciato le eccedenze di cibo a favore dei cittadini più bisognosi. Il riconoscimento assicura un importante punteggio di premialità nella partecipazione ai bandi regionali. La nuova legge bipartisan, firmata da Daniele Sabatini di Fratelli d’Italia e Marietta Tidei di Italia Viva, approvata in Consiglio regionale, punta a evitare la dispersione delle risorse in un frangente economico complesso.

Il testo normativo introduce compensazioni economiche per i Comuni che applicano riduzioni sulla TARI alle attività commerciali e agli enti coinvolti nel contrasto allo spreco. Il progetto estende il proprio raggio d’azione alle scuole e agli istituti penitenziari, avviando campagne mirate sull’educazione alimentare. La svolta arriva proprio a dieci anni dalla legge nazionale Gadda, che regola il recupero e la donazione di prodotti alimentari, farmaceutici e di altri beni a fini di solidarietà sociale e per la riduzione degli sprechi, inserendosi in un contesto sociale segnato dal carovita, dalle proteste studentesche contro gli affitti alti e dalle difficoltà delle famiglie provate dall’inflazione.

Terzo settore e agricoltura uniti nella rete di solidarietà

Il nuovo circuito del Bollino solidale e del partenariato regionale coinvolge una vasta rete di attori del territorio. La norma include gli enti del Terzo settore, le associazioni culturali e religiose, le case di comunità, le università e gli enti locali. La legge integra nel progetto anche le imprese agricole e le aziende già dotate di certificazioni etiche per il recupero delle eccedenze.

La consigliera regionale Marietta Tidei evidenzia il valore politico e sociale dell’iniziativa, pensata per rafforzare il lavoro quotidiano di realtà storiche come il Banco Alimentare. L’amministrazione mette a disposizione risorse e strumenti operativi per incrementare la redistribuzione del cibo, trasformando la risposta alla crisi in una grande alleanza di sussidiarietà.

Risorse straordinarie contro i rincari e fondi per il territorio

Il Consiglio regionale nella stessa seduta la misura che assegna 20,8 milioni di euro alle famiglie per contrastare il caro bollette e 10 milioni di euro alle aziende agricole colpite dal rincaro del gasolio. Lo stanziamento garantisce pure 1,2 milioni di euro all’Università della Tuscia e destina 915 mila euro alla promozione territoriale legata al Giro d’Italia 2027. La legge raddoppia anche le risorse per le piazze climatiche. (o rifugi climatici urbani), gli spazi pubblici progettati o riqualificati per contrastare il caldo estremo e le isole di calore.

L'articolo Dal Consiglio regionale stop agli sprechi alimentari: arrivano il Bollino solidale e il taglio della TARI proviene da Affaritaliani.it.

Years ago, when people asked Geoffrey Hinton why he worked on artificial intelligence, he would repeat a line from J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the creators of the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”

Seguir leyendo

Companies love making grand diversity promises, but actuary Peter Crowley uses basic maths to expose eyebrow-raising targets that were never realistic in the first place.

The post Why I Developed Diversity Maths appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI models, is preparing what could be the largest initial public offering in history, raising more than $100 billion, according to The New York Times, at a valuation near US$2 trillion. According to Reuters, which reviewed the draft prospectus (the document has not yet been made public), the company […]

The post Postpone AI public offerings until US Congress acts appeared first on Asia Times.

Britain’s biggest employers set bold diversity targets – but has anyone checked the maths? Actuary Peter Crowley runs the numbers and finds the arithmetic rather less accommodating than the slogans.

The post Diversity Targets: Has Anyone Done the Maths? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

University of Cambridge academics have demanded that the Jason Arday review considers the university's culpability in promoting him as "a success story" based on his race, disability and personal biography.

The post Investigate How Arday Was Promoted as Cambridge “Success Story”, Say Dons appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

The BBC pays white staff less on average than their ethnic minority colleagues in every pay band bar one, stoking concerns about the impact of the corporation's diversity drive.

The post BBC Pays White Staff Less in Almost Every Pay Band appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Anyone over the age of about 35 has no idea how far Western universities have fallen into the mire of DEI, collapsing standards and Left-wing monoculture, says Professor James Allan. It's time to sort them out.

The post It’s Time to Fix our Universities appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Just weeks before its scheduled November IPO, Anthropic is facing growing attention over the potential dangers of its technology. The resignation of former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon on September 8, who wrote on X that AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade,” preceded the company’s threat report on September 10. According […]

The post AI’s apparent danger is its best selling point appeared first on Asia Times.