Gates Warns AI Will Gut Jobs, Urges Taxes

Bill Gates says artificial intelligence is far more dangerous than the tech industry will admit, and he is calling on governments to tax AI use and to reserve some jobs for humans by law.

The Microsoft founder laid out the argument Wednesday in a blog post on Gates Notes — a roughly 6,000-word essay, according to the Financial Times — and in interviews with Semafor and The New York Times.

He told Semafor the technology has crossed dangerous thresholds in biology, cybersecurity, white-collar work and human relationships, and that the response from government and tech leaders has been non-existent.

"I am in a state of shock that I'm sort of the first one saying, 'This is crazy. This is insane,'" Gates said. "I'm just deafened by the silence."

What Gates Is Warning About

Gates predicts an economy with "far fewer" jobs than exist today. It is a reversal from three years ago, when he wrote that the coming "bumpy" AI job disruption would be "manageable."

What worries him now is not speed but scope. "There isn't a job that isn't affected," he told Semafor, predicting that in most occupations humans will eventually be "vastly inferior to the AI doing the job."

"It's different not because the speed is different, but the breadth is what makes it utterly, utterly a unique moment in evolutionary history," he said.

He also warned about bioterrorism. "I wrote a whole book about how to avoid the next pandemic," Gates said. "The bioterrorism risk is 50 times the natural pandemic risk now."

The New York Times, which interviewed him for an hour, reported he believes his industry is downplaying risks that include mass unemployment and bioterrorism. The Financial Times said the essay warns the technology will usher in "one of the most turbulent times in human history."

His Fixes

Gates floated government mandates designating certain occupations or services as "human reserved" — work that stays with people even if machines could do it more cheaply. "So what if we declare something human-reserved that we shouldn't?" he said. "The capitalistic signals are here to serve humans."

He also proposed taxing AI compute tokens and robots. A usage tax, he argued, would directly change a company's incentive to replace workers, unlike a corporate tax that only captures profits. Labor is already taxed through payroll levies, he noted, while robots can be depreciated and carry no Social Security tax.

"Today, we are very pro-robot in our tax policies, and I'm saying I think that's a mistake," Gates said.

He ruled out philanthropy as the answer, including his own. "Government is 20 times bigger than all philanthropy, so no, philanthropy cannot solve the safety-net issue," he said. "I'm by far the biggest philanthropy in the world. And what are we? We're $10 billion a year."

Industry can't fix it alone either, he said: model builders are "not policy people" and have "a little bit of a bias against talking about the potential negatives of their products."