Bill Gates posted a long essay to his Gates Notes site today, showing just how much the Microsoft co-founder has been thinking about the social impacts of AI.
Gates is mostly in the Responsible AI camp, arguing that Pacing the Frontier, 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.
He also expressed excitement about AI’s benefits to science and healthcare, but worried about the labor impacts — all pretty familiar stuff if you follow Anthropic’s policy work.
But there were a few genuinely new ideas that could change the conversation if they take off. For starters, he proposes a “robot tax”:
Right now, if you’re 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.
A tax would slow the rush away from human labor a little and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net.
He also proposes setting aside certain jobs as “Human Reserved,” essentially barring AI from being used in certain tasks. It’s an interesting idea, and one that would be easy for policy-makers to enact:
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’t easily change jobs. You can’t 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.
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’s no technical reason why it couldn’t. Yet it shouldn’t.
The Human Reserved domain will evolve over time — 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.
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’t heard much about them until now.
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.