Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates warned Wednesday that artificial intelligence (AI) will permanently eliminate many white- and blue-collar jobs and called for taxes on AI and robots along with protections reserving certain jobs for humans.
“Many jobs will disappear forever,” Gates wrote in an essay published on his Gates Notes website. He said AI could become “the greatest equalizer ever invented” or “the worst source of injustice,” and governments are not adequately preparing for the disruption.
Gates said comparisons between AI and earlier technological changes are misleading. The shift from agricultural to office work occurred over generations and created jobs requiring human thought. AI now can replace human cognition and can operate through devices and systems already in use.
AI will affect law, customer service, medicine, software, and manufacturing over roughly a decade, Gates predicted. Entry- and mid-level positions face the greatest immediate danger, while robots will eventually threaten construction, hospitality, and other physical jobs.
Gates proposed creating a category called “Human Reserved” for work that society decides should continue to be performed by people even when machines become capable of doing it.
Examples could include delivering a terminal medical diagnosis, education, and mental health care, although Gates acknowledged that governments would face difficult decisions about which jobs to protect.
Gates also proposed taxing AI tokens and robots. Employers pay payroll taxes when they hire workers but can often deduct robots as business expenses, creating an incentive to replace labor, he said. A tax could slow that process and provide revenue for retraining displaced workers and strengthening the social safety net.
Gates also said AI could make fraud, cyberattacks, bioterrorism, surveillance, and disinformation easier. He expressed particular concern about children forming relationships with AI companions and relying on the technology in ways that weaken critical-thinking skills.
Despite those dangers, Gates said AI could accelerate medical research, improve diagnoses, expand educational opportunities, and help address problems involving agriculture, energy, and climate change.
He called for new national and international institutions to manage AI’s effects, saying cooperation between the United States and China will be necessary.
“This unprecedented technology demands an unprecedented global response,” Gates wrote.
U.S. Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) supported the idea of taxing AI.
“Even tech billionaires like Bill Gates are saying we need an AI token tax to prevent mass unemployment,” Casar posted on X on Wednesday. “I introduced the first and only bill in Congress to do it.”
The Cato Institute’s Adam Michel pushed back in June on some of Gates’s ideas, including taxing the robots that replace jobs done by humans.
“Empirical research consistently finds that investment in new technologies is complementary, primarily augmenting, not replacing, work,” Michel wrote in an article.
“For workers to succeed in an AI economy, they will need more investment in newer and better tools, not less. Taxing the capital behind those tools would slow the very process that can raise wages and expand opportunity.”
Pedro Domingos, a professor emeritus of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, compared Gates to Dario Amodei in a post on X on Wednesday.
Amodei, an AI entrepreneur and CEO of Anthropic in Silicon Valley, has been labeled a “doomsayer” on AI and unemployment by the media.
“Training AI to imitate humans is not the path to superintelligence,” Domingos posted on X.
University of Washington professor emeritus Oren Etzioni said in a post he wrote for GeekWire that Gates correctly identified AI-driven job displacement but his solutions were “mostly wrong.”
Etzioni supports a tax on AI but said a proposed tax on tokens would only increase the cost of American AI and send consumers to cheaper versions made by China.
Etzioni said AI isn’t causing layoffs; it is causing jobs to never be posted. Etzioni’s solution is to encourage AI literacy and move displaced workers into the caregiving industry.
