Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, points out that jobs will be permanently lost across both office and labor sectors. He urges global leaders to promptly establish an international organization to oversee AI.
Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, published an article titled "The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical." on Gates Notes, his personal website.
The co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft warned that the world is not prepared for the effects of AI and, worse, no preparations have been made to handle it. He proposed concrete policy measures including taxing AI and robots, reserving certain jobs exclusively for humans, and creating an international organization to manage cross-border AI risks.
Gates stated that AI can be either the greatest tool for equality ever invented by humans or the source of the worst injustice. He expects the transition into the AI era to be one of the most turbulent times in human history.
Gates added that many people underestimate the scale of the impact by comparing AI to past innovations like the personal computer, which is a misleading comparison. They also focus on current model performance flaws, which are being rapidly fixed. He insists this technology is fundamentally different, and if a credible plan to slow global AI development were proposed, he would likely support it.
A concern Gates emphasized repeatedly throughout the article is the impact on employment. He predicts widespread permanent unemployment and significant social disruption, noting that many jobs will disappear forever in both office and labor sectors.
This concern leads to Gates's proposal to tax AI tokens and robots to reduce companies' incentives to replace human workers with machines and to fund social welfare programs. Another proposal is to reserve certain occupations exclusively for humans, a concept he calls "Human Reserved." Gates believes political leaders must act now, before unemployment rates soar, communities suffer, and public trust erodes.
Another proposal is to create a new institution. Gates sees existing institutions as utterly inadequate for managing AI because AI touches many sectors such as taxation, labor, public health, national security, and education, making it impossible for traditional institutions to see the full picture. Each country should have a specialized agency able to set priorities across government departments and assess risks.
Bill Gates acknowledged that such a cooperative framework requires collaboration between the U.S. and China but did not specify mechanisms to achieve this. He emphasized that the world does not have time to act slowly and urged all countries to begin establishing such an international organization immediately.
Additionally, the article mentions that Gates will expand soon on ideas to ensure AI's benefits outweigh its harms and detail how the Gates Foundation is currently applying AI.