{"id":207828,"date":"2026-08-30T18:24:24","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T18:24:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/207828\/"},"modified":"2026-08-30T18:24:24","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T18:24:24","slug":"bill-gates-wants-to-see-a-robot-tax-and-human-reserved-jobs-to-mitigate-harms-from-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/207828\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Gates wants to see a robot tax and ‘Human Reserved’ jobs to mitigate harms from AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bill Gates posted a long essay<\/a> to his Gates Notes site today, showing just how much the Microsoft co-founder has been thinking about the social impacts of AI.<\/p>\n

Gates is mostly in the Responsible AI camp, arguing that Pacing the Frontier<\/a>, the open letter published by AI employees pushing for an AI slowdown, would be a good idea, but expressing skepticism that it would be sustainable.<\/p>\n

He also expressed excitement about AI\u2019s benefits to science and healthcare, but worried about the labor impacts \u2014 all pretty familiar stuff if you follow Anthropic\u2019s policy work<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But there were a few genuinely new ideas that could change the conversation if they take off. For starters, he proposes a \u201crobot tax\u201d:<\/p>\n

Right now, if you\u2019re an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings. 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. <\/p>\n

A tax would slow the rush away from human labor a little and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net.<\/p>\n

He also proposes setting aside certain jobs as \u201cHuman Reserved,\u201d essentially barring AI from being used in certain tasks. It\u2019s an interesting idea, and one that would be easy for policy-makers to enact: <\/p>\n

We might set something aside as Human Reserved for economic reasons. For example, we may do it because allowing machines to take over a certain role will displace a large number of people who can\u2019t easily change jobs. You can\u2019t tell a 55-year-old who has worked in construction their whole career that they need to go work at an elder care facility and expect them to find it fulfilling. <\/p>\n

Sometimes the decision to make something Human Reserved will be driven by other factors. In health, for example, imagine a robot giving you the awful news that you have an incurable disease. There\u2019s no technical reason why it couldn\u2019t. Yet it shouldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

The Human Reserved domain will evolve over time \u2014 for example, we should consider setting aside some jobs now and phasing in AI slowly over years or decades with a commitment to preserve some jobs.<\/p>\n

We should also note that both ideas would put a pretty serious dent in the profits of the major labs, which may be why we haven\u2019t heard much about them until now.<\/p>\n

In addition, there are still a lot of unanswered questions about who exactly would set these rules and what exactly the rules would say, if they were to be rolled out. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bill Gates posted a long essay to his Gates Notes site today, showing just how much the Microsoft…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":207829,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[156],"tags":[651,4000],"class_list":["post-207828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bill-gates","tag-bill-gates","tag-in-brief"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/117185862876178112","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207828\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}