RANCHOS PALOS VERDES, California —Bill Gates is apparently balancing his fear of "super intelligence" with an almost unbridled enthusiasm for the future of artificial intelligence.

"No doubt in a 19-year time frame there will be more robots doing physical jobs," said Gates at the Code Conference on Wednesday.

Gates foresees them driving (autonomous cars) in warehouses and even cleaning up rooms.

The former Microsoft CEO and founder has, apparently been reading up on AI. Gate's wife, Melinda Gates, who runs the Gates Foundation with him, explained that she always knows what's on Bill's mind just by looking at his book bag. Recently, she said, it's been filled with AI books. "So while you think he’s working on philanthropy, he’s also working on AI," she said, laughing.

Gates didn't deny it and named a couple of AI books he thinks we should all be reading, including The Master Algorithm.

"The dream is finally arriving. This is what it was all leading up to," enthused Gates.

It may be that Gates is trying to catch up with the sudden rapid progress in the development of AI for the masses (virtually every company that took the Code stage this week talked about AI).

"We've made more progress in the last five years than at any time in history," Gates said.

While Gates sees the coming changes in how we work and live thanks to AI as a very positive thing, he's well aware of the challenges.

As robots and AI take over repetitive tasks, there will be an excess of labor resources.

"How do you retrain?" said Gates and added that the other concern, long-term, is question of purpose and control.

Even those concerns did not dampen Gate's enthusiasm for AI. He called it the "holy grail" as he envisions a future "with machines that are capable and more capable than human intelligence."

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