Melinda French Gates has shared she is'very nervous about artificial intelligence' being'baked with bias' because there is a lack of women developing such tools. The comments appear to take a jab at ex-husband Bill Gates, 67, who is leading the charge for the systems and facing sexual harassment allegations from former female staff. 'We don't have enough women who are computer scientists and expertise in artificial intelligence,' French Gates, 58, told CNN Thursday. She continued to explain that the tech needs to'take all people's points of view and see society and, quite frankly, see the world writ large as it is.' The comments are the first time she has spoken about the systems her ex-husband believes are'as revolutionary as mobile phones and the internet.'

Artificial intelligence has a diversity problem. Too many of the people creating it share a similar background. To renowned researcher Fei-Fei Li, this paucity of viewpoints constitutes a crisis: "As an educator, as a woman, as a woman of color, as a mother, I'm increasingly worried," she says. "AI is about to make the biggest changes to humanity, and we're missing a whole generation of diverse technologists and leaders." From the chair next to her, Melinda Gates affirms this, adding, "If we don't get women and people of color at the table -- real technologists doing the real work -- we will bias systems. Trying to reverse that a decade or two from now will be so much more difficult, if not close to impossible."

Artificial intelligence has a diversity problem. Too many of the people creating it share a similar background. To renowned researcher Fei-Fei Li, this paucity of viewpoints constitutes a crisis: "As an educator, as a woman, as a woman of color, as a mother, I'm increasingly worried," she says. "AI is about to make the biggest changes to humanity, and we're missing a whole generation of diverse technologists and leaders." From the chair next to her, Melinda Gates affirms this, adding, "If we don't get women and people of color at the table -- real technologists doing the real work -- we will bias systems. Trying to reverse that a decade or two from now will be so much more difficult, if not close to impossible."

"The thing I want to say to everybody in the room is: We ought to care about women being in computer science," Gates said at a recent ReCode conference, according to Bloomberg Technology. "You want women participating in all of these things because you want a diverse environment creating AI and tech tools and everything we're going to use." Related: Women's computer code is preferred, only if their gender is unknown Melinda Gates' comment came after her husband Bill extolled the virtues of artificial intelligence. "Certainly, it's the most exciting thing going on," he said. It's the big dream that anybody who's ever been in computer science has been thinking about." Pointing out that currently only 17 percent of computer science graduates are women, compared to a previous high of 37 percent, Melinda Gates was making a statement not only about computer science in general, but also how it could matter in the field of artificial intelligence, where rules-based behavior could be shaped predominately by men.

Mrs. Gates made that statement at a recent ReCode conference, according to Bloomberg Technology. "The thing I want to say to everybody in the room is: We ought to care about women being in computer science," she said. "You want women participating in all of these things because you want a diverse environment creating AI and tech tools and everything we're going to use." Melinda Gates' comment came after her husband Bill Gates extolled the virtues of artificial intelligence. "Certainly, it's the most exciting thing going on," he said. It's the big dream that anybody who's ever been in computer science has been thinking about."

The tech world's book-nerd-in-chief wants you to add two books to your list of summer science reads. To get up to speed on artificial intelligence, Microsoft cofounder and philanthropist Bill Gates recommends Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence and Pedro Domingos's The Master Algorithm. Gates never misses an opportunity to plug books he likes, and yesterday (June 1) at Code Conference he took a detour from his and Melinda Gates's talk of philanthropy to recommend these two titles. "Certainly it's the most exciting thing going on," he said of artificial intelligence. "It's the holy grail, it's the big dream that anybody who's ever been in computer science has been thinking about."

Bill Gates is excited about the rise of artificial intelligence but acknowledged the arrival of machines with greater-than-human capabilities will create some unique challenges. After years of working on the building blocks of speech recognition and computer vision, Gates said enough progress has been made to ensure that in the next 10 years there will be robots to do tasks like driving and warehouse work as well as machines that can outpace humans in certain areas of knowledge. "The dream is finally arriving," Gates said, speaking with wife Melinda Gates on Wednesday at the Code Conference. "This is what it was all leading up to." However, as he said in an interview with Recode last year, such machine capabilities will pose two big problems.