The founder of Microsoft has a lofty idea to save your job from AI replacement — depending on what you do, that is.
Driving the news: In an anxiety-filled blog post addressing AI, Bill Gates pitched the idea of designating “human reserved" jobs that would be shielded from AI replacement. Gates feels a share of jobs should be protected on the basis of economic and humanistic factors.
“In health… imagine a robot giving you the awful news that you have an incurable disease,” he writes. “There’s no technical reason why it couldn’t. Yet it shouldn’t.”
Gates also said that businesses should pay taxes for robots and tokens like they do for payroll taxes, an idea he’s previously floated as a way to curb AI replacement.
Why it matters: Experts are still hotly debating to what degree AI will result in job losses versus job creation opportunities, but there is no doubt the tech is already causing labour disruption and will continue to do so. While no government is currently pursuing Gates’ reserve proposal, many are looking into other ways to disincentivize rapid AI replacement.
One interesting example is South Korea, where lawmakers proposed a bill package this month that would charge companies if their AI use results in major workforce reductions.
Our take: Our guess is that a total AI jobs-pocalypse is still a little while away — even for companies that openly welcome it. Take this new Reuters report detailing Meta’s layoff push. Per internal documents, the company had to scale back an even bigger AI-powered cull this year as worker morale plummeted and because its AI agents aren’t good enough yet.—QH
