Bill Gates says AI should improve education and medicine
Artificial intelligence is "both promising and dangerous," like nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, Microsoft's co-founder says.
Artificial intelligence is an unusual technology with the potential to both harm and help us, Microsoft co-founder and now philanthropist Bill Gates urged. So to ensure it's a boon, we should put AI to work improving health and education.
"The world hasn't had that many technologies that are both promising and dangerous," Gates said Monday, mentioning nuclear energy and nuclear weapons as other examples with that much potential for profound change. As for areas where AI has helped society so far, he said, "I won't say there are that many."
But that doesn't have to be the case. He singled out medicine and education as areas where AI could help out the humans while speaking at a conference run by the new Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
"It's a chance to supercharge the social sciences, with the biggest being education itself," Gates said of AI's promise. Gates, for years, has expressed worries about the risks of AI technology.
AI, boosted by the new utility of technology called neural networks that are based loosely on the way human brains work, has revolutionized the technology industry. It's used for everything from facial recognition to scouring spam out of email inboxes. Gates wants more than just tech giants like Amazon, Google and Facebook to benefit, though.
More selenium, fewer premature births
As one example, he said, AI has been used to pore through 23andMe genetic data to discover that a shortage of the element selenium could be associated with premature births in Africa. In 18 months, we should find out whether the resulting program to give 20,000 women more will help.
"We expect to see about 15 percent reduction in prematurity, which for Africa as a whole would project out to be about 80,000 lives saved per year," Gates said.
For education, he hopes AI will let us find what works in schools and reproduce that elsewhere. "We have not even begun to do that work of understanding motivation and engagement and teaching styles that would really improve the output of the system -- better learning, less dropouts," Gates said.
Gates grew rich from technology as his company's software -- namely Microsoft Windows and Office -- spread across the globe. He's since shifted to philanthropic efforts, perhaps most notably an effort reduce deaths from malaria.
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