Normally I like to read and skim for main ideas, then distill it down in my mind to a paragraph or a few bullet points. If I let an AI do this for me, I skip the thinking part which is the whole reason I do this thing. But I simply don’t have time to even skim this article by Bill Gates, so I did ask Gemini to summarize it for me. I feel like he wrote this for an international NGO-type audience, and it is written in fairly general terms which a few politicians might try to turn in to specific action, but I can’t imagine this moving the US political system much. Anyway, he says governments should (at least I’m summarizing Gemini’s summary, so I have to use my brain a little bit):

• Update tax and benefit policy before unemployment starts to rise.
• Update worker retraining programs before unemployment starts to rise.
• Strengthen cybersecurity.
• Use AI to accelerate research and development specifically in health care, education, agriculture and climate change adaptation.
• International cooperation blah blah blah.

The silver lining I can come up with is that in the United States we have existing programs and policies that address almost all of these (Social Security, Medicare, Trade Adjustment Assistance, the massive intelligence/surveillance/cybersecurity cluster, NSF, NIH, USDA/NOAA to name just a handful. We need a value added tax – but let’s think of a catchy name for the concept – which we don’t have.) They may be inadequate or outdated, but there is a foundation to build on. Internationally, I think the world needs to figure out if the UN can be salvaged or if we need something new (or some strengthening or cobbling together of other groups/frameworks that already exist) to perform the communication, coordination, and conflict resolution functions that the UN has provided (imperfectly) for the last 70 years or so and that it recently seems unable to provide.