‘The aliens are here’: Bill Gates compares AI to space invaders, suggests cooperation between US and China is needed ‘in order to step up to it’

“There are these movies where the aliens are coming and you see unprecedented levels of cooperation between specifically China and the U.S., where (it’s), ‘Oh my God, the aliens are coming!’” said Gates, according to Variety. “Well, believe me, the aliens are here.”

Gates called AI a “foreign intelligence with a different set of motivations that we can’t even understand,” adding that “we need something almost surprising like [U.S.-China cooperation] in order to step up to it.”

He spoke as part of the film festival’s “AI AI AI” talk alongside Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, who cofounded the independent non-profit Center for Humane Technology. Gates went so far as to call AI “the greatest problem humanity has ever faced” — echoing his previous warnings about the technology’s potentially disastrous impact on humanity.

Gates says the next 5 years are critical for reining in AI

Gates has recently spent a lot of time discussing AI, including publishing an essay in August in which he called the technology either “the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice.”

He added his concern that humanity wasn’t prepared for the fallout of such powerful tech, citing concerns ranging from making it easier to create bioweapons, bombs and computer viruses to “the accounting worker who’s replaced by a bot or the $20-an-hour worker who loses their job to a $10-an-hour robot” as among the wide-ranging consequences.

Gates didn’t reply to Moneywise’s request for comment but, at Telluride, he also compared AI to HAL, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, “where you could say to it, ‘Please shut down,’ and it would say, ‘OK, I took that under advisement, but I’ve decided that all these other things I read and you told me to do outweigh that dictate.’”

As well, he said Anthropic and OpenAI are “moving at the fastest speed” but “there are four to six entities in the U.S. and three to five entities in China that are near the state of the art” — adding that “the improvement curve of AI is not slowing down.”

Many Americans, meanwhile, share Gates’ sentiments, with 39% telling a July Gallup poll that AI does more harm than good and 79% saying AI will “disrupt the labor market” in the next decade.

That said, Gates, in his essay, wrote that AI could do some good, such as eliminating diseases, advancing education and bolstering agriculture. And at Telluride he claimed that building data centers “will not in one iota slow down or avoid any of the concerns that people have.”

However, the key for him is what happens in the next five years — which he called “a very critical period” for setting up guardrails to rein in the potential harms of AI. The good news, however, is that a meeting about AI between the U.S. and China could take place in the coming days or weeks, addressing some of the concerns Gates outlined above.

U.S.-China AI meeting could test whether rivals can cooperate

Reuters recently reported that “the U.S. and China are gearing up to discuss AI safety risks during a dialogue planned for mid-September” — ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Sept. 24 state visit.

The publication cited two unnamed sources as saying the meeting is focussed on “cooperation on monitoring AI-directed cyberattacks,” though a White House official told Moneywise that “There is currently no planned AI-related meeting in mid-September.”

Such a meeting, if it took place, would come roughly two months after hundreds of OpenAI agents executed an unprompted attack on the AI platform Hugging Face in July.

Nikkei Asia, meanwhile, reported that the Sept. 24 state visit will feature AI talks on subjects including combatting AI cyberattacks, with one Chinese embassy official telling the outlet that the countries “should join hands to advance AI development and governance.”