Latest / Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts / Bill Gates Wants to Wall Off Some Jobs From the Machines — He Could Only Get to 40 Percent
Transcript
- 0:00[Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, where somebody finally tried to build a fence around your job. Axios reported on August twenty-sixth that Bill Gates wants certain occupations legally reserved for humans, and asked how far it goes.
- 0:16[Guest] Forty percent. In a very extreme form of it, Gates said, he could imagine that share reserved for people, then added, quote, but that's as high as I can get.
- 0:29[Host] Reserved by what? An actual law saying a machine isn't allowed to do this?
- 0:36[Guest] Roughly. He calls them Human Reserved jobs, after nature reserves. Land you could develop and don't.
- 0:43[Host] Which jobs make the list?
- 0:45[Guest] He floated childcare and jury service to Axios, caregiving in the essay. A robot could hand you a terminal diagnosis, he argues, and shouldn't.
- 0:55[Host] I'm with him. But notice what the fence is for. It isn't paying anyone's rent. It's about having somewhere to be at eight in the morning that matters.
- 1:08[Guest] Then you need an answer he doesn't give. Who decides which jobs qualify, and what stops a company routing that work somewhere with no fence?
- 1:19[Host] That's a real hole. What's the other half?
- 1:22[Guest] Money. He wants to tax AI tokens, the units the labs meter and bill you by, and tax robots.
- 1:30[Host] Why does usage need taxing at all?
- 1:34[Guest] Because the code pays you to swap. Hire someone, you owe payroll tax on their earnings. Buy the machine that replaces them, you write it off.
- 1:45[Host] You can check that on any employer's books.
- 1:48[Guest] Oren Etzioni, who founded the Allen Institute for AI, told ABC News that Gates has the diagnosis right and the prescription wrong.
- 1:58[Host] Wrong how? Taxing what you want less of is the oldest move there is.
- 2:04[Guest] He said taxing tokens is like taxing keystrokes on a typewriter. It measures effort, not displacement.
- 2:11[Host] So the firm that cleanly replaces a whole department pays less than the one fumbling around burning tokens.
- 2:19[Guest] And he asked what happens when American tokens get taxed and buyers switch to Chinese models. He backs a robot tax instead, since the robot can't leave your warehouse.
- 2:32[Host] Fine. Congress taxes the robots, funds the retraining. Are we done?
- 2:37[Guest] The tax buys groceries. The fence buys a reason to get up. Gates is answering two problems with one essay and funding only one.
- 2:47[Host] So by his own arithmetic, sixty percent of the workforce gets neither.
- 2:53[Guest] And he names them. Per the essay, sales and customer support, software engineering, and paralegal work go first. Construction and hospitality go to robots by decade's end.
- 3:04[Host] Those are the jobs people took student loans to qualify for.
- 3:09[Guest] Gates hedges on one. He thinks cheaper software creates new demand, so the net loss is smaller, as long as humans own the design.
- 3:20[Host] So what pays for everyone outside the fence?
- 3:23[Guest] Not a payroll tax. Denmark runs the best-funded floor on earth, and per OECD data three quarters of its revenue traces back to wages. Every floor we've built is financed by taxing the work Gates says is leaving.
- 3:40[Host] He told Axios this needs a tax change bigger than any in his lifetime, in the most polarized politics of that lifetime.
- 3:50[Guest] He also said he'd love to be convinced he's wrong about the job market. He isn't.
- 3:57[Host] Back to those two problems. Patrick Deglon names the second one the Stagnation Problem in Unscarcity. A fence doesn't solve it. A reserved job is still somebody else deciding what your morning is worth.
- 4:12[Guest] For more on what replaces work when the work is gone, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.