Bill Gates says technology has stunned him only three times, and the third came this year

[GrimAnchor]

The Times of India has a story about Bill Gates saying technology has stunned him only three times in his life, with the third happening this year when he took a close look at something new. It is a great hook, and coming from someone who has seen every major computing shift since the 1970s, it carries weight. Gates is not easily impressed. When he says something stunned him, people pay attention

Gates has talked about the first two before. In his 2023 essay The Age of AI has begun, he wrote that he had seen two demonstrations of technology that struck him as revolutionary. The first was in 1980, when he was shown a graphical user interface, the forerunner of every modern operating system including Windows. The second was in 2022, when OpenAI showed him a model that could pass an AP Biology exam, which he had challenged them to achieve. Those two moments bookend most of the modern computing era

I will let the article explain the third moment rather than spoil it. What strikes me is the spacing. Forty years passed between the first and second, then only a few years between the second and third. That says a lot about how fast things are moving now, whichever way you feel about it

It also fits a pattern in Gates' recent comments. In August he warned that AI is more dangerous than big tech will admit and that some danger thresholds had already been passed. We have covered his warnings about global AI rules being harder to agree than Cold War nuclear talks, and his idea of taxing robots. He clearly sees AI as both the most impressive and the most worrying technology of his life

So which three technologies would make your own list of moments that stunned you? For me, the first time I saw the internet would be up there. Do you think Gates is right that we are living through an unusually fast period of change?

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says technology has truly stunned him only three times in his life, and the third happened this year when he looked closely at... - The Times of Indiatimesofindia.indiatimes.com