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Gates warns AI threatens billions

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Bill Gates warned that advanced artificial intelligence could cause "a billion deaths" and urged the U.S. government to intervene amid rising concerns about AI safety.

Reposted by Jurgen Schmidhuber

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Reposted by Catherine D’Ignazio, Woodrow Hartzog, Janet Murray , and 7 more

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abeba.blacksky.app
over the past few weeks several AI evaluation/cybersecurity experts have explained how what's happening is a result of human incompetence rather than "AI going rogue". I'm begging the media to show a shred of journalistic integrity and stop parroting what altman or amodei say
September 24, 2026 at 8:12 PM

Reposted by Arvind Narayanan

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by Timnit Gebru

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by Elizabeth Warren

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warren.senate.gov
We can't trust AI companies to regulate themselves.

It's time for Congress to start taking AI seriously and put safeguards in place to protect Americans.
September 25, 2026 at 2:18 PM

by Kaushik Basu

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by Ian Bremmer

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Reposted by Nathan P. Kalmoe

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karlbode.com
this is, so we're clear, the kind of stuff unrealistic AI doomsday scenarios are intended to overshadow in the press

half-cooked automation layered onto already very broken systems in a country too corrupt to have working regulators
UnitedHealth uses AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit alleges
For the largest health insurer in the US, AI's error rate is like a feature, not a bug.
arstechnica.com
September 25, 2026 at 3:40 PM

Reposted by Suresh Venkatasubramanian

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natolambert.bsky.social
Hearing AI regulation is in the air, especially with a misguided tone of “open dangerous, closed safe” so it felt timely to re-up this one. There are ways to make the AI industry safer without kneecapping transparency, education, and competition.
www.interconnects.ai/p/banning-op...
Banning Open Source AI Would Be A Mistake
This post was originally an op-ed co-authored with Kevin Xu of Interconnected for a general, non-technical audience.
www.interconnects.ai
September 25, 2026 at 1:12 PM

Reposted by Harold James

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Project Syndicate
The Great AI Gamble

As the two leading powers in AI development and adoption, the United States and China are each operating under assumptions that justify ever-faster progress, regardless of the risks. Today's thinking is not unlike the rationale once used for Stalinist brutality in the name of rapid modernization.

The Great AI Gamble
Reposts 0 4h

by Eric J. Topol

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by Niclas Berggren

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Reposted by Brendan Nyhan

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dburbach.bsky.social
Readers, please keep using "Artificial Intelligence", whatever the superintelligence who brought us Diagram 9 may recommend
September 25, 2026 at 4:19 PM

Reposted by Devi Sridhar

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The Guardian
We all know a lack of exercise is bad for our bodies. So what is relying on AI doing to our brains? | Devi Sridhar

I suspect nearly all of my students use AI, and I worry about its corrosive effects. We must not entrust tech companies with our long-term health Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh When I was a postgraduate student at the University of Oxford in the early 2000s, I interviewed for a major consulting firm. All my friends were being recruited, and I thought why not give it a shot? Aside from the usual maths-proficiency test (how quickly can you crunch numbers in front of a client and look smart), I was asked about what the future of streaming could look like. I gave a long-winded answer about the unintended consequences of changing how humans interact with each other when a new technology is introduced, and why this may not be in the best interests of health and society. I even remember saying something like: “Can you imagine just being stuck at home, alone, watching show after show and never having to move or see any other people? Why would anyone choose that over going out to rent a DVD at a local shop, or to a movie theatre? ” You won’t be surprised to learn that I wasn’t invited for a follow-up interview. Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh Continue reading. . .

We all know a lack of exercise is bad for our bodies. So what is relying on AI doing to our brains? | Devi Sridhar
Reposts 0 8h

by Andreas Bieler

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AI and the Class Struggle, see socialistproject.ca/2026/09/ai-a...
AI and the Class Struggle
The notion that so-called Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are destined to degrade human labour, if not destroy it altogether, has become a commonplace. In a report published in 2023, Goldman...
socialistproject.ca
September 25, 2026 at 2:54 PM

by Steven H. Seggie

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stevenhseggie.bsky.social
It’s just software
financialtimes.com Financial Times @financialtimes.com · 2h
AI is powerful enough to kill a billion people if it falls into the wrong hands, Bill Gates has warned, as the Microsoft co-founder urged tougher government regulation of the technology. ft.trib.al/8yuutat
September 25, 2026 at 3:28 PM

by Shannon Vallor

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shannonvallor.bsky.social
‘We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.’ This is a CEO openly confessing to a level of acquired mental indolence that, were he not coddled 24/7 by an army of paid underlings, would make him incapable of living independently and feeding himself. He’s fine with it.

Your kids won’t be.
mford.bsky.social Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 1d
Ezra Klein asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about AI making kids worse at math and reading. Huang’s reply: “Does it matter?”

Then he said he doesn’t know his own address or phone number. “We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...
So the message of this research out of China, where you were seeing a lot of kids using A.I. to help them, was that when they were using the A.I., they were getting things done faster. But it turned out that the skills they were learning were not holding, that their actual personal performance, at least in the way we traditionally measure it, was degrading. What do you think when you hear that? The last part — I completely agree. Try to get a kid to do long division right now. The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness. Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter? That’s my question for you. Yeah. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does. But there must be some set of skills that matter. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But maybe not those. We’re going to discover new ones. Just maybe not those. There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address. And I —— I don’t really believe that to be true. It’s completely true. Janine will tell you and Lori will tell you. One day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it. But let me take the other side because I don’t want to fall into a thing where, because some skills can be safely offloaded —— Yeah. I also can’t get anywhere without a mapping system now. Never could, frankly. But I’m a big reader. And one of the skills I really value, one of the capacities I have that I really value is an attention span formed on physical books. You’re a big reader. I’ve read about the kind of reading you do. And there is, prior to A.I., a lot of concern and noticing among college professors and others that the way people use the internet has probably shortened attention spans. Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off. Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off. Yeah. Well, I think that we’re going to lose some finer intellectual dexterity, but we’re going to be better systems thinkers. Today’s engineers are far better systems thinkers than I was when I graduated from school. But I was a much better transistor thinker. What do you mean by systems thinker? They think of large systems. Today’s computers have trillions, hundreds of trillions of transistors in them. When I first graduated from school, the first chip I worked on had 200 transistors. I knew every one of them by name. No engineer does that today. Most engineers now work well above the transistor, well above the functionality, and they’re cobbling things together to do things. So you need to think much more about systems and interactions of systems. So some of the lower-level knowledge is gone.
September 25, 2026 at 11:02 AM

by Henry Farrell

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himself.bsky.social
I was indeed trying my best to be generous! But there was a fair amount of half-arsed adversarial thinking that was game-theory _inflected_ about How The Machine Would Break Out etc, which more or less assumed that AI would be far better capable of being rational than humans.
September 25, 2026 at 3:20 PM

by Dean Baker

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by Aaron Sojourner

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aaronsojourner.org
We need a War on White Collar Crime: Battle with the Billionaire Hackers
bsky.app/profile/nich...
nicholasgrossman.bsky.social Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 5h
Greatest trick AI leaders have pulled is convincing many people—especially influential people in govt, media, and business—that their software is intelligent, independent, yet never culpable.

Humans build it, humans deploy it, but no one bears responsibility for the things that happen when they do.
abeba.blacksky.app Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 21h
over the past few weeks several AI evaluation/cybersecurity experts have explained how what's happening is a result of human incompetence rather than "AI going rogue". I'm begging the media to show a shred of journalistic integrity and stop parroting what altman or amodei say
September 25, 2026 at 3:32 PM
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