Bill Gates Wants to Wall Off Some Jobs From the Machines — He Could Only Get to 40 Percent
About This Episode
In a nearly 6,000-word essay published August 26 on gatesnotes.com, Bill Gates proposed taxing AI tokens and robots to close the gap between what it costs to employ a person and what it costs to buy a machine, and floated 'Human Reserved' occupations that society would deliberately leave to people. In an accompanying Axios interview he said that even in a very extreme version, the most work he could imagine protecting this way was about 40% of jobs. A leading AI researcher publicly agreed with his diagnosis and rejected his central tax.
Our Take
Gates got the diagnosis right — the tax code literally pays employers to swap people for machines — but the fix he reached for taxes something that can move offshore, and his own 40% ceiling is the number that should scare us.