Bill Gates wants to see a robot tax and ‘Human Reserved’ jobs to mitigate harms from AI

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: