Bill Gates has revived his call for a robot tax and paired it with a second proposal: carve out a class of jobs that should remain in human hands even if AI becomes capable of doing them.
In an essay titled The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical, the Microsoft co-founder argues that the labor market is tilted by the tax code. Employers pay payroll taxes when they hire a person, he wrote, but a robot can generally be written off immediately as a business expense.
“The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines,” Gates wrote.
A tax on AI tokens and robots
Gates’ proposed remedy is a tax on AI tokens, the units language models use to process text and other data, along with a tax on robots themselves.
The idea is not new. Gates first floated a robot tax in 2017, when economists mocked the proposal as a tax on productivity presented as a tax on progress.
He is still making the case. Gates says a usage tax would change employer incentives directly, unlike a corporate tax that cuts into profits, which may already be thin in a fiercely competitive market. Labor is already taxed through payroll levies, he argues, while robots depreciate and pay nothing into Social Security.
The jobs he says machines should not take over
The second pillar of the essay is a category of work Gates calls “Human Reserved.” These are jobs society would intentionally keep for people even when AI could technically handle them.
He compares the concept to a nature reserve: land that could legally be developed, but is left alone because what exists there is worth more as it stands.
Childcare and jury service are his clearest examples. Gates has written before that his father received round-the-clock care before dying of Alzheimer’s in 2020, and that “something in the care they gave my dad was irreplaceably human.”
Education and healthcare fall into a less clear middle ground in his framework. In those fields, Gates expects people to remain present while using AI to extend their reach.
He puts the outer limit of the idea at roughly 40% of jobs and says he could not push the share higher without weakening the argument. Gates also divides the protection into two forms:
- permanent protection for roles such as caregiving;
- temporary protection for workers who cannot realistically retrain on short notice.
His example is a 55-year-old who has spent an entire career in construction and cannot quickly move into an unrelated field.
Why Gates thinks this shift is different
Gates spends much of the essay arguing that AI should not be treated like earlier waves of technological change. The move from farm work to office work took generations and created new categories of labor that still required human judgment.
AI, in his view, skips that step. He says it can substitute directly for human cognition in law, customer service, medicine, software, and manufacturing, and that it can do so within a decade rather than over several decades.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has made a similar argument. He has said that as many as half of entry-level white-collar jobs could disappear within five years.
Warnings are ahead of the data
So far, labor data has not fully matched those warnings. A Yale Budget Lab and Brookings study published in October found no sign of mass displacement in federal employment data through July.
California’s new AI unemployment tracker has shown a similar pattern to date. There has been no statewide layoff wave, though the tracker did flag rising unemployment claims among college-educated workers in occupations exposed to AI.
Gates says he is not waiting for the data to turn before pressing the issue. “I’d love to be convinced that I’m wrong about the job market, but I’m not,” he said. He added that he would stake his reputation on AI proving “very bad for the job market.”
A decision point in the next few years
Gates frames the essay as a fork in the road. AI, he wrote, ends up “either the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice,” and the outcome will be decided in the next few years, not the next few decades.
He is calling for new national coordinating bodies and an international institution to manage the transition. Gates says that work needs to begin now, while the robot tax he first proposed nine years ago is still waiting for a government willing to try it.
