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Comments (401)

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  jcattle
  Just to put Bill Gates thoughts on AI into perspective, this was his comment on an AMA 9 years ago to the question"What kind of technological advancement do you wish to see in your lifetime?":> The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test.https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/im_bill_gates_...
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  geraneum
  > Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses.It’s so cute some people think that the extent of mass displacement will be limited to what happens to the unemployed. Oh poor unemployed! Nope, pitchforks will be grabbed. It won’t be rosy. Maybe they dream about having killer robots to defend themselves, but imagine a few hundred million people getting angry within one election cycle.
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  phn
  If all jobs are taken away for the sake of robot driven productivity, who will consume the products and services being offered that result in profit?!(EDIT: I am not against AI at all, just trying to understand where this all leads)
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  qudat
  3 citations and a lot of conjecture. Is the article only targeting SWEs? The one study cited said 22-25 age range saw a 16% decrease in relative employment declines (for SWEs)[0]. But everyone outside that range was not impacted. Further, what about all the trades jobs around data center development?“Demand is also being intensified by major investments in infrastructure, manufacturing, reshoring, and AI. Data center growth alone has added a net 315,000 skilled-trade workers over the past five years, according to the report, putting additional pressure on an already tight labor market.”https://www.morningstar.com/news/pr-newswire/20260825cg32433...We literally do not have enough trades people to build out data centers and their salaries are increasing as a result. These are skilled labor jobs (plumbers, electricians, IT, etc.). Does Bill Gates care about the rest of the economy outside of SWE?[0]: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/Cana...
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  seydor
  - If AI and robots are as good as Bill suggests , one can infer that AI will signal the end of cities, at least the end of megacities. If the home robot can clean and cook and also do my taxes, hair, and diagnose my health , one is more likely to escape unemployment by moving to a small town where he can find land and resources, and use robots to exploit them, just like humans have always done when economy was based in agriculture. If there is no longer a reason for people to live close together, decentralization is the most likely outcome.- The biggest geopolitical impact will probably come from AI weapons. Just like previous shifts in weaponry caused the fall of empires , the rise of naval empires and the rise of national modern superpowers, AI may lead to the end of the UN and beginning of something new.- Societies will change but a plan is not needed and it's most likely useless. Societies adapt , and nobody has ever been able to predict how. Let's not make the same mistake again.
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  swed420
  > Instead, solutions should be developed through a public democratic process that includes elected officials, policymakers, educators, health workers, local officials, and community leaders. Millions of people will have their lives disrupted, and we’ll need a stronger, more flexible social safety net to help them manage the transition. Local communities are already raising concerns about the energy and water needed for data centers. Without solutions, some groups will push for stopping AI development and deployment altogether.Sounds great, except it ignores the fact that capital interests have controlled the levers of our faux democracies for decades, with no end in sight.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty
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  ankurdhama
  If the result will be huge job loss doesn't that mean the overall buying power of all across all economies will go down drastically which begs the question who will buy the stuff that these companies that get rid of people are making?
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  dostick
  > We have to think now about how to reduce job losses so that everyone can share in the prosperity that AI creates.And I thought he is a smart man. This is so last century thinking. We need to prepare that there will definitely be no jobs for everyone and that will be falling all the time, it’s not a one-time event you should “prepare for”. There’s nothing to prepare, we already have funds and productivity to feed and shelter everyone. UBI is not a privilege, previous generations were slaving 9 to 5 all their lives so we can have it. This is it, arrived, and now, enter a few decades of historical period when all of us waiting for government bureaucrats to realise that UBI is a right.
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  295817
  That all sounds nice, but does he mean it and can we trust him?Setting up governance bodies and think tanks could be a diversion. He does explicitly suggest a robot and token tax, so that is something.He does not address the issue of IP theft or the possibility of shutting down AI altogether like medium range missiles (SS20/Pershing II) were removed by treaties. The could be AI treaties with China and Russia, except of course the US has no credibility now compared to the 1980s.
• cupofjoakim
  The issues are global and they are correct. The landscape is not the same in US as in other countries, but this is a global problem and should be handled as such.I'm not against a tax on AI or robots, but I think this may be the big chance we have to look at universal income with new eyes. If jobs are to disappear, why not soften the blow and get rid of some of the inefficiencies many government processes mean in terms of other citizen benefits?What I worry about more however is the malevolent actors across the AI space. I'd argue that most companies mean well, but chasing profit at all costs can very easily turn into malevolence. Both these and actors being malevolent on purpose needs to have a control function.
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  shay_ker
  > I’m also worried about AI’s impact on education. Ironically, the same tool that will allow people to learn more than ever could also lead to many people learning less.For teachers/admins who are on HN: what has worked in a past for a "new way to educate" students to actually be implemented by educators? Does it happen through conferences? Do some states take the lead and others follow? Does it follow from private schools into public schools?I know AI labs are trying to include teachers here and there... but IME teachers are very "anti-AI", "anti-datacenter", etc. etc. In coastal cities, the unions will be entirely opposed. This seems less of a "can AI be useful for education" question and more around politics and messaging. But I'd love to learn more.
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  shay_ker
  > In the United States, I’ve met families who, understandably, were overwhelmed by the process of applying for health insurance, student aid, or food assistance. Faced with a huge stack of complicated bureaucratic forms, many felt like giving up. AI can streamline things dramaticallyI'd love to see anyone building Grokbot or ChatGPT Work talk about how they're thinking about this use case, specifically. It seems greatly important and tractable given how little government websites & forms change over time.On the other end - yes, it will create massive vectors for abuse & fraud, since govt services are designed to have roadblocks to reduce usage. But fraud has always been possible, even without AI (so many recent examples to pull from).IMO it's best to maximize social benefits to see where the tradeoffs really are. We won't know until we push on it!
• ford
  I'm interested how to mitigate risk without over-regulating & stifling innovation from exactly the people who are most thoughtful about the risk (which is who we should want innovating & leading).Even though this article is new, I'm not sure it has materially new ideas vs what some other labs have been claiming for years.Enforcing safeguards that apply globally to good and bad actors alike so far as proved quite difficult - compute is essentially the only lever, and that's tenuous at best.Unlike nuclear arms (where functionally there's a limit at MAD), so far we believe that with enough compute, energy, and algorithms, intelligence will continue to scale (and not only scale - but compound)
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  dhd415
  I thought Gates' take on the human relational aspects of AI to be thoughtful, but I am surprised that his analysis on the economic and jobs aspect of AI offers little more than the party line. Every other technological advance that improved productivity (Industrial Revolution, etc.) has resulted in the loss of some jobs but the creation of jobs in other areas and an overall increase in the standard of living (although admittedly not uniformly distributed across the population). Why will AI be different?
• swills
  Nearly every post about AI turns into a discussion of politics and every post about politics becomes a discussion of AI.
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  dgllghr
  And why should we listen to this pedophile who never once considered how the good outweighed the bad while running his company?
• k310
  It always is a matter of choice. Rich people choose wisely for the fast buck, and poorly for the suckers they bend, fold, spindle and mutilate.I get the sense of "Every Accusation is a confession"> During my entire life I’ve only had two jobs. In the first one, I played a role in developing software to empower people through my work at Microsoft.Some of us remember the story/urban legend of Bill Gates "developing" BASIC by retrieving a printout of source code from a dumpster, a process infinitely more efficient than an LLM.NOTE. "Played a role in developing", not "Played a role BY developing"The former could be said by the coffee maker. Or dumpster diver.
• grigio
  Bill is great to find solutions for his problems
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  shay_ker
  > I doubt I would have put in the same work if I had had an AI companion back then. They talk to you in ways you’re already comfortable with. They don’t push you outside your comfort zone. They are always available and never get mad at you. This gives them the potential to become highly addictive and to rob us of the lessons we learn from connecting with other people.I've been waiting for a long, long time for us to figure out how AI makes us more social, not less. Outside of memes of course.
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  alun
  I think his idea of taxing AI tokens would do more harm than good. It would only make AI more expensive, which would create the exact inequality effect that he is trying to prevent.
• BiraIgnacio
  > If someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, I would likely support it. However, I don’t think that’s going to happen. The geopolitical and economic incentives are pushing too hard to go full speed ahead.
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  debo_
  > I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots. 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.
• ajd555
  Interesting read, good to see some nuance in this space for once: not evil, can be used for evil, not good, can be used for good, but requires a lot of safeguards. What really got me is the concept of "Human Reserved" - man that is a depressing thought...
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  VCFundedGenYer
  He should be talking to Satya, not spitting in the wind. He used to run MS, he still has sway.
• anon
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  cmiles8
  To be blunt I don’t know that the world really cares what Bill Gates thinks anymore.
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  vb-8448
  Is this Bill's? Because it looks like Dario's essay!
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  saturn_vk
  This is a fundamentally wrong approach.Let AI replace jobs. Start taxing companies that use AI proportionally to their usage, and then distribute the proceedings to the people.
• kristianpaul
  The choices are for the present but not for a future we dont know yet.
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  narmiouh
  Its quite interesting that in a matter of few minutes, this went down from 2 to rank 21 on HN front page.
• r721
  Another discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451313
• Supermancho
  Sigh. Another billionaire whose wealth is being mistaken for authority by the common folk. Worse still, an actual oracle.I see an old (and successful) pirate king trying to wear yet another hat today.
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  zzzeek
  poor Bill Gates is one of the richest men on earth but can't get a good ratio on Hacker News
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  simianwords
  It’s a good thoughtful piece. If I may suggest, the main problem and I mean the actual main problem are those people who underestimate the capabilities of AI. The ones who think it hallucinates all the time, unreliable and mostly useless.The average person thinks this technology is overhyped (like Emily Bender) so how would one even begin to have a conversation with them on the risks?
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  josefritzishere
  That is a very indirect way to say market crash.
• oxag3n
  AI can make everyone miserable. Solution? Partner with all major AI companies using foundation (tax free btw) money. It's like saying Hitler is bad, let's split Europe in half so we can profit as well... ah well, that actually happened.
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  ViktorRay
  This essay kind of rubs me the wrong way. Starting from the very beginning.During my entire life I’ve only had two jobs. In the first one, I played a role in developing software to empower people through my work at Microsoft.Yikes. We all know powerful people have an incentive to whitewash their pasts but there is whitewashing and then there is whatever that is.I have to mention this because we can't forget that Microsoft's and Bill Gates's history regarding fear uncertainty doubt as well as embrace extend extinguish. "Forgive but don't forget" as the old saying goes.During the 2000's Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer described the GPL as akin to a virus. He begged European governements not to adopt open source software and to adopt Microsoft software instead.Indeed throughout its history Microsoft, along with Gates and Balmer, have consistently fought against implementation of open standards and open source software. They have consistently pushed towards their own proprietary solutions.Given all of this, along with the laughable whitewashing attempt even at the very beginning of his essay, I feel like what Bill Gates has written here is consistent with his previous behavior in regards to all of this. I suspect all this talk of regulation is an attempt to squash open source AI and open weights AI and to ensure Big Tech such as Microsoft continues to be in control of the future of tech and the future of AI.Even his talk of taxing AI tokens and robots would ultimately benefit Microsoft and other Big tech companies and hurt open source.I will repeat what I said earlier. In life it is important to "forgive but never forget." Many have forgiven Bill Gates for all he did in the 90's. Many haven't. But nobody should forget and everyone should take his words with a grain of salt.
• anon
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  _-_-__-_-_-
  Gates was a close friend and blackmail victim of Epstein. I can't separate his business, technical and philanthropic accomplishments from that fact. Sure, he may have funded charitable campaigns to vaccinate against polio in Afghanistan. But, he was also getting rub-downs from underage children.
• andai
  What if there were some mistake and the progression went wrong, and something like an amoeba were given power like a human's?—AKIRA, 1988
• anon
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  ETH_start
  I'm going to make an anti-capitalist argument in order to make a pro-capitalist argument.The anti-capitalist argument is that the wealthiest people in the world are not dramatically more intelligent than the average person. Bill Gates is obviously very intelligent and capable, but his IQ does not scale with his wealth. He built the right company at the right time, and Microsoft ended up sitting at the center of massive network effects. Relatively modest advantages in judgment, skill, and industriousness can end up producing enormous differences in wealth due to the compounding effects of success.That's just how scalable markets work. So Gates's success, while evidence that he was very effective at building Microsoft, is not evidence that he is vastly more knowledgeable than everybody else about economics or the future of technology.And the same applies to Bezos, Musk, and every other extremely successful founder.Their arguments should be judged on their merits and not treated as infallible insights from people with superhuman intelligence.Now, that is not to say that I want their wealth to be capped or politically reallocated. The case for private property depends on the argument that decentralized ownership and investment and capital risking is better than politicians allocating a pool of resources to gain clout or win over popular opinion. A wealth cap or high taxes on the wealthy would transfer control over resources from private owners to political institutions. So what we would be doing is replacing imperfect private allocation with imperfect public allocation, where the people allocating the capital have limited information, political incentives, and the ability to impose costs on others without their consent. So I reject blind deference to billionaires, but I do not want politicians to control billionaires' capital.Anyway, let me address Gates's argument about AI:Gates argues that AI will disrupt the economy faster than previous technologies, and therefore stronger government coordination is needed to address the rapidity of the speed of that transition, to cushion people against the speed of that transition. But what his analysis underweights is how quickly AI can help people adapt to the very transformation that AI brings about.For example, a worker taking on a new position now has access to a tutor and an analyst and a business advisor all wrapped up in one, who can provide world-class assistance 24/7 at the cost of a few cents in electricity. And someone who wants to start a business can employ dozens of AI agents at a cost of a few hundred dollars to test out the idea and build out a prototype within a few days. So what this means is that we cannot hold the human adaptive capacity constant while trying to determine the impact of AI's disruptive capacity.The second problem with Gates's argument is that he only counts the income that people might lose when AI replaces jobs, but he doesn't count the fall in prices that the same AI will bring about. The fall in prices is effectively an increase in purchasing power. That increase in purchasing power, in economic terms, means an increase in real wages, and that's exactly why wages increased twentyfold between 1826 and 2026. Automation brought about abundance, which reduced prices and thereby increased purchasing power, i.e. increased real wages. If you look at tokens right now, their prices are going down exponentially. They've gone down about a thousandfold over the last four years, while the capability of the tokens themselves has increased. So AI is following exactly the same price trends as every other previous computer technology.If AI becomes a major input into medicine and education and administration and logistics, that means that all these goods and services become radically cheaper, which means that paychecks can buy a lot more of them. So that's, I think, a huge hole in his analysis. It's also, I think, very simplistic to assume that the future will be based on labor. It could very well be one where the average person becomes a business owner and employs a fleet of hundreds or thousands of AI agents to work for them. That's exactly what the price trends in tokens would suggest.The broader problem I see with his model is that it assumes disaster from a technology that creates abundance. This seems to me to be fundamentally misguided about the essential dynamics of what's actually happening.Finally, if AI is ever capable of doing every single thing that a human can do, AI would possess very dangerous traits. And why I say that is because humans themselves are very dangerous. If we're going to create a product, we're not going to create a product that has human-like traits. But it is some of those very traits that make humans dangerous that also make them useful in the economy. We tolerate humans having these dangerous properties because that's what we were born into, and we accept that and we legally protect humans despite the fact that they're dangerous. But nobody, no company, no country will tolerate people creating AI that is dangerous. An autonomous, self-motivated and potentially rebellious digital intelligence is not only not a useful business tool, it's also not a tolerable risk. And if that is ever created, we will have much bigger things to worry about than unemployment and no solution to the problems that this would create would be found in greater taxation.And as long as that is not created, then there will be abilities or skills that humans uniquely possess that will become the limiting factor in the economy. In other words, all other processes will scale exponentially through mass production of GPUs until all the available scarce human skills are employed in managing those GPUs. That follows the basic pattern that has preceded us over the last 200 years, and there's no reason to assume that pattern will not hold.
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  blastro
  Bill Gates? The Epstein guy?
• owen-hill
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• DangIsComplicit
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• eclips0
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• orangelimesoda
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• OhNoNotAgain_99
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• mabini
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• ShutUpPedo
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  oriettaxx
  I honestly can't stand reading a single line more of Bill Gates pontificating, I really can't.
• HNPedoLovers
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  HNPedoLovers
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  YCTraffickers
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  jqpabc123
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• Interesting3
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• NellyOfficial
  Lemme in now, Lemme in now, Bill Gates, Donald Trump Lemme in now we f-ckin lesbian twins now
• BillWho
  Can Bill Gates even code anymore? I bet not.Bro is a useless sex offender, who cares what he thinks about anything.The weirdest part is HN hiding the comments lmao
• greenowl
  More fearmongering overhyping the technology. The investment bubble MUST continue!
• CrzyLngPwd
  Morpheus; You think that's a genuinely concerned billionaire you are listening to?
• roschdal
  Bill vibe-coded this article text.
• whoamii
  “We need a plan to ensure that the good outweighs the bad.”How apt… for Bill Gates to state this.
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  myaccountonhn
  > With its ability to synthesize knowledge from every scientific field, AI can accelerate innovation in the world’s toughest technical challenges: providing reliable clean energy for everyone, combating climate change, growing enough food, eradicating diseases, and moreI really think this is overstated. So far everything is pointing towards AI accelerating climate change. Especially if we'll automate everything with physical robots.
• mvkel
  I'm kind of surprised, but not surprised, by Gates' comments here. Until very recently, apparently, he was a pretty strong techno optimist, now toeing the line of a doomer. The verbiage is substantially in line with the fear-based marketing out of anthropic. I wonder what motive is underneath all of this. Trying to influence policy? But he has so many resources, it transcends policy.