Back in 2022 with the launch of OpenAI, artificial intelligence (AI) has become a part of most workplaces and it has reshaped the way we think and work. In the past few months, AI tools like Gemini, Copilot, etc are commonly being used at work across the world– so much so that many professionals are worried how it will change the future of work and affect several jobs.
Talking on these lines at the India Express Adda, when Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Bill Gates was asked if humans should be worried about AI taking over in the near future, he said, “This (AI) is a deeply profound advancement which at some point will change all activities quite a bit. The revolution that I was a part of was about– taking computers from being very expensive to being essentially free. When I was young, whenever I heard there was a computer that was available, even at night, I would go and get access to them… They were just so scare. Now, the idea that your personal computers get used only a few hours a day– it shows how inefficient it is.
“Now that we have is intelligence which is scare, like brilliant doctors, brilliant engineers, even people to make support phone calls, telesales phone calls– we see intelligence is scare. And through AI we’ll able to solve unbelievably complex problems today. Not all of them, but a lot of them– they are already superhumans. But because they are not perfectly reliable, people are hesitating ‘Where should we apply these things’. I think if rolled out properly, these things can be used for health and education, etc. Whatever the timeline if the capability and reliability is perfected, then you’re in a world where inventing drugs, writing proposals, making telesales calls– it’s just software! That intelligence will be free. So you go from a shortage of teachers, doctors, to as much doctor expertise as you want,” he added.
In the past few months with the advancement of AI, many tech leaders like NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, among others have often shared their views on how coders could lose their jobs in the near future due to AI. However, sharing his views on this, Gates said that despite becoming better and widely used in the future, AI won’t be able to replace three professions, namely that of coders, biologists, and energy experts. Elaborating this, he said that coders will still have an important role to play. For biologists– instead of replacing them, AI will be used for disease diagnosis, DNA analysis, etc; however since AI would lack creativity, it cannot replace biologists in making scientific discoveries. And on similar lines, Gates further said that AI won’t be able to replace energy experts as their field of work is too complex to be made completely automated.
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