This week, Ezra Klein interviewed Bill Gates to talk to him about his thoughts on recent AI developments. Gates is not well-loved by a lot of people on the right, but he's undoubtedly smart and that makes some of his commentary more interesting than it might otherwise be.

Last month I wrote about a paper Gates wrote about the dangers of AI and how he effectively rejected a plan which Bernie Sanders had already put forward to have the U.S. government seize 50 percent ownership of every AI company. Instead he proposed a less extreme tax on AI tokens. 

The core point he's trying to make here is that the danger of AI isn't in the future it's here right now. AI is already smart enough that it could help a skilled adversary to take down an economy or design a deadly bioweapon.

In short, we don't need to imagine crazed AI, because we already have plenty of crazy people.

Gates gets really worked up at the suggestion that AI companies can regulate themselves. He's definitely eager to see government take a big role in this. "This is the most dangerous thing that humans have ever gone near," he said.

He also talked a bit about the "race" to achieve AGI with China. His view is that there's no winning that race at this point because both sides have everything they need to keep it going and developing. It's too late to stop that progress in general. But he believes that some kind of government monitoring won't put the U.S. significantly behind. In general he seems a lot more comfortable with trusting China to be reasonable with its use of AI than I am. He completely skips over the fact that China already runs an authoritarian police state that monitors everyone all the time. AI will only amplify that ability. I'm not sure why that doesn't worry him at all.

Sadly there's no follow up from Klein on that question. I'm not surprised by that but this is really the core of the current debate and I would have expected Klein to flesh out the territory a bit more. Instead he moves on to other questions.

I've only made it through half of this interview, which is pretty long, but it's worth watching because Gates probably has some impact on this larger debate. He's not controlling the outcome, but he has a seat at the table by virtue of his long history in this field. Here's the full interview.

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