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Bill Gates to college grads: Get a job in AI, but don’t forget inequity around you

Bill Gates
Image Credit: Prime Minister's Office, Norway

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In a series of tweets Monday, college dropout and Microsoft cofounder and former CEO Bill Gates tweeted told college graduates that if he were graduating today, he would look for a job in artificial intelligence, biosciences, or energy — industries “where you can make a huge impact.”

In the stream of 14 tweets published this morning, Gates says in retrospect that he placed too high a value on intelligence and that it took him decades to learn about inequities happening in the world. He goes on to encourage graduates to surround themselves with people who challenge you in constructive ways. He recommended The Better Angels of Our Nature, a book by Steve Pinker that explains reductions in violence in recent human history.


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Gates has both said he expects AI to create breakthroughs that makes people better learners and that robots should be taxed at a rate equivalent to a human worker’s income tax in order to offset the impacts of or discourage automation.

In other news related to AI and inequity, earlier this month Melinda Gates and Google’s Fei-Fei Li created AI4All, a nonprofit organization geared toward getting more underrepresented groups like women into artificial intelligence.

“As an educator, as a woman, as a woman of color, as a mother, I’m increasingly worried,” Li told Backchannel. “AI is about to make the biggest changes to humanity, and we’re missing a whole generation of diverse technologists and leaders.”