Bill Gates is raising fresh concerns about artificial intelligence, cautioning in a new essay that the technology could reshape the U.S. labor market at extraordinary speed and threaten millions of jobs.
Unlike earlier waves of innovation, Gates argues, AI is moving through the economy at a far faster pace. The Microsoft co-founder described its progress as happening at a “mind-blowing rate,” giving workers, companies and policymakers much less time to adjust to major employment disruption.
“AI will take on work in law, customer service, medicine, software, and manufacturing. It will hit these industries rapidly, over the course of a decade rather than a few generations,” Gates wrote in an article posted Wednesday on his personal website. “There will be some new jobs, but without the right policies, there will be far fewer than exist today.”
In the nearly 6,000-word essay, Gates lays out several risks tied to artificial intelligence, but he gives particular attention to what AI could mean for American workers. As the technology becomes better at reasoning, he said, it is starting to compete more directly with the kinds of cognitive skills that have long set human employees apart.
“The biggest shift for workers will happen when AI provides nearly error-free work,” Gates wrote. “At that point, it will be able to function on its own without a human checking in on it, and companies will have every economic incentive to let it.”
That shift is already beginning in many white-collar fields, Gates noted, as businesses hand over tasks such as data analysis to AI systems and reduce their reliance on human labor. He also warned that young people entering the job market could face a tougher path if entry-level openings become scarcer.
The risk, he added, is not limited to office work. Gates said advances in AI-powered robotics could soon allow machines to perform physical labor at a level comparable to people, putting pressure on blue-collar sectors such as construction.
“I think ‘smart’ robots will begin to compete with people on some physical tasks — in the construction and hospitality industries, for example — by the end of the decade,” he wrote.
Humans only?
To prepare for such changes, Gates said it is urgent to discuss policies to mitigate AI’s impact on jobs. One idea would be to introduce a tax on AI tokens and robots, a move Gates argued would slow companies’ displacement of human workers.
“Right now, if you’re an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings,” he wrote. “But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense. The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines.”
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Gates also advocates reserving certain jobs, such as caregiving, for people, noting that humans are better able to handle certain responsibilities than robots. He equated that approach to creating a nature preserve in which societies choose to protect land rather than build on it.
“Some countries might insist on having humans take care of the elderly,” he wrote. “But a country like Japan, which has a shrinking workforce and not enough young people to care for the old, may welcome a caregiving robot.”
The rapid advances in AI mean policymakers, legislators and other decision makers must act now to develop a framework to address potential disruption from the technology.
“I believe we need time to prepare for the period of social, political and economic upheaval we are about to enter,” Gates said. “The people who need the most time are the ones who have the least — the accounting worker who’s replaced by a bot or the $20-an-hour worker who loses their job to a $10-an-hour robot.”
Alain Sherter
