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Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says that the world is unprepared for the scale of disruption that AI will cause. Gates proposes new institutions, 'Human Reserved' jobs and a tax on AI and robots, among other things.

Bill Gates has warned that the shift into the AI era will rank among the most disruptive periods in human history, and cautioned that governments, industries and communities are not doing enough to get ready for it. In an essay published on his blog, Gates Notes, titled 'A turbulent AI era - and critical choices to make', the Microsoft co-founder and Gates Foundation chair argued that artificial intelligence could either become 'the greatest equalizer ever invented' or 'the worst source of injustice,' depending on the choices made in the coming years.

Why this transition is different?

Gates wrote that comparisons between AI and earlier technological shifts, such as the move from agricultural to office-based work, understate what is coming. Past transitions unfolded over generations and created new categories of work requiring human judgement, he said, whereas AI is capable of substituting directly for human cognition across law, medicine, customer service, software and manufacturing. He argued this disruption would play out over roughly a decade rather than several generations, leaving little time for workers and institutions to adjust.

He also pushed back on the idea that AI's limitations, such as earlier struggles with basic reasoning tasks, mean its impact is being overstated. According to Gates, those reliability gaps are closing quickly as models learn to check and improve their own output.