Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, in his 2024 forecast, stated that artificial intelligence could make the world “a fairer place.”
The billionaire believes that, with timely, prudent investments in the technology, it could help close the time gap in which innovations reach poor and rich regions of the world.
Gates sees, for example, the potential of using AI in developing new medicines, as this field requires processing massive volumes of information.
Meanwhile, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, founded by him and his wife, primarily supports creating tools that address health problems disproportionately affecting developing countries. As examples, he cited AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.
Gates acknowledged that these projects face “a long road ahead” and face “serious obstacles” such as reliable access to computing power or the challenge of scaling without sacrificing quality. Yet he is confident that all of this will be solved.
“We can learn a lot from global health about how to make AI more equitable. The key lesson is that the product must be adapted to the people who will use it”, — he noted.
The investor compared AI’s current development stage to the early internet era, recalling the substantial time lag then in the adoption of new technology between rich and poor countries. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is working to close this gap by backing innovations, Gates stressed.
“If I had to make a forecast, in high‑income countries such as the United States I would estimate that there are 18–24 months left before AI reaches a significant level of use by the population at large. I expect to see a similar level of diffusion in African countries in roughly three years”, — he stated.
He assessed the gap to be significantly smaller than earlier delays with other technologies.
Analysts forecast success for the AI–Web3 symbiosis, despite Gates’s skepticism
As an advocate of AI, Gates previously skeptically assessed the significance of Web3 and metaverses. Some experts, by contrast, believe that the cross-pollination of these technologies is rapidly growing and offers substantial innovative opportunities.
“Although the potential for integrating artificial intelligence and blockchain remains largely uncertain today, the new use cases and possibilities opened by both technologies are enormous”, — said in an interview with The Block analyst Sandra Leow in Nansen.
One of the key directions she named was the development of AI agents — tools that blend elements of the cited technologies. Such online bots could help process transactions and exchange assets on behalf of users.
According to отчету Gemini titled 2024 Crypto Trend Report, the integration of AI and Web3 can:
- improve privacy and data security;
- protect and identify human-created content;
- provide an alternative in large-scale cloud applications and services development.
“Weaknesses of centralized AI can be mitigated by decentralized cryptography, enabling the technology to develop safely while delivering powerful and useful features that serve humanity as a whole, without being dominated by the interests of a few”, the company’s experts stressed.
In their view, solutions such as zero-knowledge proofs hold the potential to enable machine-learning processes with heightened privacy. Such projects could help the cryptocurrency industry move beyond a niche status.
Earlier, Bill Gates predicted the “death” of Google and Amazon as AI advances, and a shortening of the work week to three days thanks to the technology.