overestimate

Bill Gates, on AI: “We overestimate what will happen in the next 2 years and underestimate what will happen in the next 10” There is a phrase that Bill Gates often repeats with the conviction of someone who has already seen how the world made mistakes when judging a technology: “We overestimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what we can achieve in ten.” Although it may fit in a time of uncertainty and technological leaps like the one we are currently experiencing with AI, it is not actually new. It appeared in his book ‘Path to the future‘and recovered it in ‘Source Code: My beginnings’. However, the co-founder of Microsoft does not use it to show off that he has succeeded in his technological commitment to desktop computers, but rather to ask for a little calm and perspective in the face of the most disruptive technological moment since the arrival of the personal computer that he lived in first person. a déjàvu technological. Gates has spent months dedicating a good part of his interventions to cooling the collective panic around the arrival of AI. In one of his interventions to promote his latest book, the millionaire intervened in the Jay Shetty podcast and took the opportunity to send a reassuring message: we already experienced something similar when Windows arrived, and then there were also those who thought that the world was ending. Since he left the helm of Microsoft in the hands of Steve Ballmerhas continued to advise its management team, including those responsible for the alliance with OpenAI. According to collected Business Insiderboth CEO Satya Nadella and the Microsoft management team turn to the founder as an advisor in the face of relevant strategic changes for the company. That low-key but influential role gives him a different perspective on the current AI revolution. For this reason, he insists that society’s fear of this new technology follows the same patterns that it already experienced in the early years of Microsoft. AI is an opportunity, but also a risk. In his annual letter The Year AheadGates described AI as a technology with “no upper limit” to its capabilities, leaving it in a full of opportunitiesbut also of great risks that must be managed. In that same publication he assured that “of all the things that humans have created, artificial intelligence is the one that will change society the most.” The millionaire identifies two major threats for the next decade: the use of AI by malicious actors and the emergence of AI in the labor market. Among the dangers that he cites with most concern is the use of this technology to design weapons with a comparable scope to that of the COVID-19 pandemic. Work, the great battlefield. One of the effects of AI that Gates analyzes in more detail is what it will have on employment. Assumption It is not catastrophicbut direct: technology will allow the economy to produce more goods and services using less labor. He points out that AI is already doubling the software developer efficiencywhich makes programming cheaper and alters labor demand in that sector. Gates also points out that AI will affect less expected industries, with medicine and education in the spotlight. He does not present it as an inevitable threat, but as a wake-up call to adapt before change arrives without warning. Optimism with nuances and a commitment to act now. In his analysis of 2026, the technology magnate insists that the decisions made in the coming years will determine whether AI becomes a factor of shared progress or an additional source of inequality and social suffering. Staying true to his phrase, Gates assures that the time to act is now, not when technology is already uncontrollable and its effects irreparable. What makes his vision different is the balance that proposes an intermediate place between catastrophism and blind euphoria. Gates learned this concept forcefully in his first years at the helm of Microsoft: consider the worst and best scenarios, because you cannot be so optimistic as to think that everything will always turn out as planned, nor be so pessimistic as to believe that everything will be an absolute failure. In Xataka | Bill Gates had a tendency to procrastinate until he found an infallible remedy: Japanese companies Image | Flickr (Governor Tom Wolf)