Bill Gates wants a class of jobs that AI is not allowed to take — childcare and jury duty to start, funded by a tax on tokens

In a roughly 6,000-word essay published on 26 August, 'The Turbulent AI Era Is Here. The Choices We Make Are Critical', Bill Gates argued that governments have no plan for what AI is about to do to work, and put forward three proposals. First, new national and international institutions to coordinate policy. Second, a category he calls 'Human Reserved': jobs deliberately kept for people even where a machine could do them. He takes the phrase from nature reserves — land you could build on but choose not to, because the loss would be too great. Childcare and jury service belong there outright, he says; education and healthcare are a mixed case, where protected workers would use AI to extend what they can do. Pressed on how far it could go, he put the ceiling at 40 percent of jobs and called that 'as high as I can get', which leaves most of the labour market to whatever happens. Third, a tax on AI tokens and on robots, on the argument that the current code taxes wages more heavily than capital and therefore nudges employers toward machines; he described the change required as greater than any in his lifetime. He named sales, customer support, software engineering and paralegal work as the roles most likely to go first, with construction and hospitality following by the end of the decade. Three years ago he described the same transition as manageable.

✓ Verified · 5 sources

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