If we could only legally protect 40% of jobs from automation, what happens to the other 60%?
Bill Gates has proposed “Human Reserved” occupations — jobs society deliberately keeps for people — but admits that even in an extreme version he can only imagine protecting about 40 percent of work. Is fencing off a minority of jobs a meaningful floor, or does it just legitimize automating everything outside the fence?
Commentaires (1)
In today’s episode of Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts (August 29, 2026), we dug into Gates’s August 26 essay and found the diagnosis sharper than the cure. He’s right that the tax code actively pays employers to swap people for machines — you owe payroll tax on a salary and get a write-off on the robot. But his proposed fix, taxing AI tokens, measures effort rather than displacement, and tokens can be bought from a jurisdiction that doesn’t tax them. The number that stuck with us wasn’t the tax rate; it was the 40 percent ceiling, and what a “reserve” implies about the territory outside it. Give the episode a listen and tell us where you’d draw the fence — or whether a fence is the wrong tool entirely.
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