This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Bill Gates published a new essay warning that the AI industry is crossing the safety lines it set for itself, and that nobody is preparing for what’s coming. At age 70, he also uses AI more than most people half his age, and he finds it enthralling, as you’ll hear on this week’s show, with highlights from our interview with him.

Along the way, we dig into his three proposals: new institutions for managing the transition, a category of jobs reserved for humans, and a tax on the use and purchase of AI and robots.

The change in his own tech usage: “I joke with people that I used to have Claude-like people that I would send email to, but they were so slow, and there were some topics they didn’t actually know. … It’s three a.m. I want to understand sodium batteries, and now there’s no reason to go to sleep. Here we go. Yeah, it’s crazy.”

How he uses AI specifically: “If you’re a curious person, this is a mind-blowing time. When I’m working on malaria, nutrition, my poor humans that I work with always get these long conversations from me, where I paste in — me, Claude, me, ChatGPT. Sometimes I do it if there’s three of us: Claude, ChatGPT and me, debating these things.”

On where personal agents are headed: “We will get to a point where you won’t buy things yourself. You just won’t. … You won’t go to those applications. You’ll just go to your personal agent. … From a productivity point of view, we are in heaven.”

What has surprised him: “I was shocked by ChatGPT, and I was shocked by Claude Code. Those are both things where I went, oh my God. … I did not expect that a statistical machine would essentially learn to read, and the idea that the code is better than human code. Those are two stunning thresholds.”

On writing this essay: “It’s very unnatural for me to think that innovation may be a net negative if it’s not managed properly. The more I wrote the memo, the more I was like, Jesus, we really need to get our act together here. Even though this may come across as negative, that’s the truth. If we don’t step up, the negatives will substantially outweigh the positives.”

What AI leaders say privately: “You’re in this perverse period right now where people in the AI industry who are willing to say that AI might have some negative effects are told, ‘Hey, you’re hurting our PR while we’re trying to raise trillions of dollars.’ … I know they’re all worried. Or all of them that I know, which is basically everybody but Elon.”

On losing control of AI: “The wake-up for the memo is that the bad stuff thresholds are all being crossed. Even lack of control that I thought would be many years from now, we’re seeing lack of control. … These are people who are super expert on the thing, going, well, maybe we won’t be able to control these things. What kind of risk have we chosen to run here?”

On how fast robots are coming: “What’s weird about AI is it’s better at doing jobs across the entire economy, including physical jobs when the robots come — which you can guess when that is, but my view is it’s only a couple of years.”

Is he still an optimist? “I don’t think being pessimistic is helpful. I do think, wow, this is sure an interesting time. I’m the guy who in my 30s thought people in their 50s or 60s didn’t understand anything. So it’s kind of bizarre if a guy who’s 70 comes and writes a memo that’s actually helpful. … But I am very concerned. And honestly, when you get people one-on-one, so are they.”

Related headlines and links

• The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical. — Bill Gates, Gates Notes
• ‘I am very concerned’: Bill Gates says the world needs a plan to deal with AI, and he has three ideas to start
• Bill Gates says there’s ‘no upper limit’ on AI, citing opportunity and risk
• Etzioni on AI: Bill Gates has the right diagnosis but the wrong prescription
• Dwarkesh Podcast: Ryan Greenblatt — What happens once AI can automate AI research?
• NPR: Trump’s new AI safety order seeks voluntary review of new models
• New York Times: Bill Gates is warning that A.I. is more dangerous than Big Tech will admit
• Wall Street Journal: Three takeaways from Bill Gates’s 5,784-word warning on AI: ‘There is no plan’
• MIT Technology Review: Bill Gates says we’ve passed AI’s danger thresholds. Now what?
• Axios: Gates confronts the Epstein questions hanging over his AI push
• Transcript: Here’s what Bill Gates told lawmakers in his recent Epstein testimony
• OpenAI: A Collective Approach to Cyber Defense

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Edited and produced by Curt Milton. Music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell.

When Bill Gates talks, people listen. This week he published a lengthy essay on what AI is going to do to work, and told GeekWire that people inside AI companies who name the downsides get told, “Hey, you’re hurting our PR while we’re trying to raise trillions of dollars.”

He’s right about the hard part. The job displacement he describes lands on young workers first, and the safety net is funded by taxes on the very wages that AI erodes. He prescribes three treatments: new institutions at home and abroad, a tax on AI tokens and robots, and “Human Reserved,” a category of jobs only people may hold.

Gates has the diagnosis right but the prescription mostly wrong. I’d sign the robot tax tomorrow, because hiring a person costs you payroll tax every year while buying a robot gets written off in year one. The other two I’d send back.

Let’s start with what’s solid. Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab updated its “Canaries in the Coal Mine” work this month. Employment for 22-to-25-year-olds in the most AI-exposed occupations is running 19% below where it would be if it had kept pace with their peers in less exposed work, up from 15% a year ago. The same authors say they don’t see widespread, economy-wide displacement, and unemployment held at 4.1% in July.

The AI damage isn’t arriving as layoffs. It’s arriving as jobs that never get posted, and Gates is right that the young get it first.

Now the token tax. Tokens (essentially words) are what AI companies bill by. Taxing tokens is like taxing keystrokes: it measures effort, not displacement.

A high school class working through calculus with an AI tutor burns tokens continuously. A model that quietly retires a 40-person customer center might burn relatively few. The tax lands hardest on the uses Gates says he wants to protect.

Stanford’s AI Index put the cost of GPT-3.5-level performance at $20 per million tokens in November 2022 and seven cents by October 2024, a 280-fold drop. You’d be indexing the safety net to a number that falls every year while displacement rises.

And you can’t collect it. Inference runs on laptops and phones now, and on servers in whatever country declines to sign. A token tax is a tax on whoever uses an American API, and every dollar it adds makes a Chinese model look cheaper. We’d be slowing ourselves down and not China.

Gates says the institutions will take years to build, and also says we can’t afford to move slowly. He’s right twice, and that’s the problem. He wants the international body to borrow from nuclear inspections and aviation regulation. That may pan out in the long term, though the UN is the cautionary tale for the bureaucratic nightmare that the international community can produce.

Meanwhile we have functional agencies with jurisdiction today. The FDA can rule on AI in diagnosis. The FTC can go after AI-enabled fraud. We don’t need a new agency to say a bank can’t deny your mortgage because a model felt like it. We need the banking regulator to reiterate it forcefully.

That leaves Human Reserved, his best idea but his most privileged one. Gates would protect a job for either of two reasons: the role is deeply personal, like a caregiver, or the people who hold it are unlikely to find other work. Only one of those holds.

Freezing headcount because the workers have nowhere else to go protects the job for a while and makes the service more expensive along the way. Reserving the moments when a human being is the point is defensible, and Gates makes that case well. On a robot delivering the news that you have an incurable disease, he writes, “There’s no technical reason why it couldn’t,” and adds, “Yet it shouldn’t.” He’s right.

I made the case in WIRED nine years ago that displaced workers should move into caregiving, and that it would take real money to lift the pay enough to draw them.

The problem with Human Reserved is that it assumes there’s a human being available. Home health and personal care aides earn a median of $34,900 a year, and BLS projects roughly 765,000 openings in that occupation every year through 2034. At that wage, they keep coming open. A third of home care aides are immigrants, and tighter enforcement threatens that supply. A rule that reserves care for people, in a market with no spare people, reserves care for the families who can outbid everyone else.

Gates half-anticipates this, telling The New York Times he might be a flawed messenger because of his wealth. On this point he is. The caregivers who gave his father something irreplaceable were in that room because someone could pay them to be there.

So don’t fence AI out of the room. Put it to work in the hours nobody is paid to cover.

In February the Times ran Eli Saslow’s story about Jan Worrell, 85, living alone on Washington’s Long Beach Peninsula with an AI companion called ElliQ that engages her about eight times a day and pushes her to stay hydrated and moving. (I serve on ElliQ’s board, and I joined because the company builds a machine that extends a caregiver’s reach instead of replacing one.)

Her goal, she told her doctor, was to never live anywhere else. Fund enough aides to cover the hours that need a person and put the machine on the rest.

Here’s where I net out: equalize the tax treatment of labor and capital, which Congress could do next session, and route the proceeds into retraining and into topping up the pay of workers who land in lower-paying jobs. That’s a better answer than a protected job title.

Drop the token tax, build the caregiving workforce instead of fencing it off, and use the regulators we already have while somebody works on the ones we don’t.

Bill Gates is legendary, bordering on notorious, for his late-night emails — missives to colleagues with piercing questions about Java back in the day, or malaria these days, or whatever esoteric topic he happens to seize upon at any given moment.

But increasingly, he is sending these messages to AI, not to people. He’ll bounce something off Claude, get ChatGPT to weigh in, and insert himself in the middle.

He described the pattern in an interview with GeekWire: “It’s 3 a.m., I want to understand sodium batteries. Now, there’s no reason to go to sleep. Here we go! Yeah, it’s crazy.” 

If you’re a curious person, he said, “this is a mind-blowing time.”

In terms of productivity, he added, “we are in heaven.”

All of which might be predictable. This is Bill Gates, after all. Now 70 years old, he has spent more than five decades impatient for the future to arrive — making the case that innovation, on the whole, will ultimately put humanity and the world in a better place.

So here’s the surprise twist: He’s now deeply concerned about where technology is headed, how fast it’s progressing, and how little the world is doing to get ready.

In a new essay, Gates says the “turbulent AI era” has arrived, with technology threatening to erase categories of jobs, supercharge fraud and deepfakes, lower the bar for cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, make it easier to engineer a deadly new disease, let governments kill without humans involved in the decision, and fundamentally change how kids grow up.

If someone came up with a credible plan to slow the pace of AI globally, he writes, he’d likely support it. But he doesn’t expect one. The geopolitical and economic forces are too much. 

He says that the world needs to take action, and offers three ideas to start:

Build new institutions, at home and globally. No existing agency was designed for a technology that touches jobs, security, health, energy and elections all at once, he writes.

Gates calls for new national bodies that can set priorities across agencies, plus a new international organization modeled on nuclear weapons inspections, aviation rules and the ozone treaties.

Set aside jobs for humans. Gates calls this “Human Reserved”: work that machines will be fully capable of doing, but that we decide to keep for people anyway. The model is a nature reserve — land where we could build roads and buildings, but choose not to, because the loss would be too great.

One example: a robot delivering the news that you have an incurable disease. “There’s no technical reason why it couldn’t,” he writes. “Yet it shouldn’t.” 

The idea came in part from watching the caregivers who looked after his father through Alzheimer’s, work he describes as “irreplaceably human.” 

Tax AI tokens and robots. Today a company that hires a worker pays payroll taxes, while a company that buys a robot deducts the cost. Gates says that gives employers a reason to replace people. He’s calling for a tax on AI to change the incentives and help pay for retraining. 

He first floated a robot tax nine years ago, but the idea was widely dismissed. He’s still for it. He acknowledges that it isn’t economically efficient, but says that with innovation accelerating, we can afford a little inefficiency as the price of keeping people employed.

Gates is candid that he doesn’t have all the answers, particularly on the proposal for “Human Reserved” jobs. Who decides what gets reserved, and by what criteria? How do you keep companies from using robots in the jobs that are supposed to stay human? 

These, he writes, “will need to be worked out in public.” 

In the meantime, he’s working it out with Claude. Gates said he has talked the idea through with the chatbot, thinking through different ways to get the share of work reserved for humans up to 40%, using shorter workdays and earlier retirement to spread what’s left around.

Crossing the threshold

In the GeekWire interview, Gates said the essay came out of a specific realization: the AI industry is blowing past its own warning signs, one after another, and almost nobody is saying so out loud. 

For years, he said, people in AI described certain moments as dangerous points where the industry would stop and think hard before going further: making it easier to build a bioweapon, making it easier to launch a cyberattack, building machines people become emotionally dependent on, wiping out large numbers of jobs, and losing control of the technology itself.

“We’re in the process of crossing every single one of those thresholds,” he said.

Meanwhile, nobody in the industry wants to be first to step on the brakes. “Most people you talk to will say, yeah, well, if everybody else would slow down, maybe I would, too,” he said.

Gates said one way out of that standoff is for governments to step in. 

His example: any AI model capable of designing new molecules — the capability that would let someone engineer a new disease — should be monitored. The monitoring would be mandatory rather than voluntary, and it would cover free models as well as commercial ones. It would also have to be written so a company can’t copy the model elsewhere and strip the monitoring out.

“To me, that’s kind of like common sense,” he said. “But we don’t see a specific proposal to do that.”

‘The whole thing seems so empty to me’

Under an executive order signed by President Trump in June, AI companies are asked to submit their most powerful models for government testing up to 30 days before release. The order specifically bars the program from becoming a licensing or preclearance requirement. The White House finalized the framework in early August.

Gates said he doesn’t get it.

“What is the threshold that’s being examined, and what is the action taken when you cross that threshold?” he said. “The whole thing seems so empty to me.”

If the world can’t take these basic steps, he said, “I really am going to throw up my hands.”

If the process stays voluntary, with no line and no consequence for crossing it, “we’re going to look back on this as a kind of eye-of-the-storm type moment,” he said.

Asked if he had taken his proposals to the Trump administration or to other heads of state, Gates said with a bemused tone, “Well, you could tell me who at the White House I should be talking to about this.” He said he hopes the essay reaches people in Congress and in the executive branch.

He said the public argument among AI companies over whether the risks are real is beside the point, because privately the people running them already agree. “I know they’re all worried,” he said, “or all of them that I know, which is basically everybody but Elon.”

People inside AI companies who acknowledge the downsides, Gates said, get told: “Hey, you’re hurting our PR while we’re trying to raise trillions of dollars.”

Gates said he previously expected losing control of AI to be a distant problem, something to worry about “many years from now.” He’s no longer convinced that’s the case.

He referenced an Aug. 11 episode of the Dwarkesh Patel podcast featuring Ryan Greenblatt, chief scientist at the AI safety group Redwood Research. Greenblatt said that as AI systems get more capable, the people building them understand less and less about what is happening inside, and that sufficiently advanced models could end up working against their creators.

“These are people who are super expert on the thing, going, well, maybe we won’t be able to control these things,” Gates said. “I mean, what kind of risk have we chosen to run here?”

In the poorest countries, he expects AI to do more good than harm. In the countries where the Gates Foundation works, doctors, teachers and farm advisors are all in short supply. AI can help fill those gaps. The foundation will lay out that work at its Goalkeepers event next month, including an effort to make AI models work as well in African languages as they do in English.

The job losses, he added, will hit rich countries first.

Gates published the essay early Wednesday morning, and it’s drawing coverage from a variety of outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and MIT Technology Review.

It’s the first big wave of new attention on the Microsoft co-founder and Gates Foundation chair since he answered lawmakers’ questions in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation on June 10, sitting for a nearly six-hour voluntary interview with the House Oversight Committee.

Gates, who has not been accused of any wrongdoing, was asked by Axios whether he’s concerned that the Epstein issue could undercut his message. According to the site, he compared this to earlier situations when personal and professional challenges diminished his ability to speak out on key subjects: during the Microsoft antitrust trial, and his divorce from Melinda French Gates.

The AI Road Ahead

For all of this, Gates is still thinking about how technology will change human life and productivity, in many ways for the better on an individual level. 

• A key step, he said, will be establishing broad-based persistent memory for AI agents across contexts. For now, AI still doesn’t know you like a human assistant who’s familiar with your relationships and how you think about your time. 
• Gates sees the role of apps changing in the future. Instead of bouncing between different pieces of software, he said, AI will increasingly be the primary interface. “You won’t go to those applications,” he said. “You’ll just go to your personal agent.”
• He also sees AI continuing to transform shopping, to an extreme: “We will get to a point where you won’t buy things yourself. You just won’t.” Telling the agent to help you buy something, “it’ll consider so many more things, and it’ll make it so much easier for you to do it.”

Asked whether he is still an optimist, Gates didn’t answer directly. “I don’t think being pessimistic is helpful,” he said.

“I do think, wow, this is sure an interesting time. I’m the guy who in my 30s thought people in their 50s or 60s didn’t understand anything.” He called it “kind of bizarre” that he would be delivering a message like this at 70.

“But I am very concerned. And honestly, when you get people one-on-one, so are they.”

Visiting an Amazon delivery station can feel like walking into the past.

While many of its massive fulfillment centers are equipped with the latest robots and automation, Amazon’s delivery stations — the final stop before packages reach the doorstep — remain mostly manual. Workers often sort parcels by hand, load them into bags, and stage them for drivers.

That could be changing. Business Insider reports that Amazon is developing an internal initiative called Project Tetromino to build “fully automated” delivery stations, citing an internal planning document that includes specific financial projections.

The name appears to be a nod to Tetris, reflecting the puzzle-like challenge of efficiently organizing packages for delivery vehicles.

“We’re always exploring and testing new technologies across our operations to improve safety and the delivery experience for customers,” Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser said in a statement. He added, “The details cited here are inaccurate and don’t reflect our current plans. Like any early-stage concept, this is one of many initiatives we regularly evaluate, and plans evolve significantly as we learn.”

Business Insider reported that a key technology behind the effort could come from Boxbot, an Alameda, Calif.-based robotics startup that uses conveyors and AI-driven storage trays to automatically sequence packages for vehicle loading. The company says the process is up to 10 times faster than manual methods.

Boxbot has raised $29.5 million from investors including Toyota Ventures, Playground Global, and Maersk Growth.

Responding to an inquiry from GeekWire, Boxbot CEO Austin Oehlerking said he could not comment on activities with any specific customer but said the company has “tested and deployed live systems within the parcel delivery, logistics, and automotive industries over the last several years.”

Oehlerking described Boxbot’s technology as filling a gap in warehouse automation. Automated storage and retrieval systems are typically designed for fulfillment operations, while Boxbot is building them for high-throughput package handling at other points in the supply chain.

“This type of storage system can be very useful at different points in the supply chain, depending on the customer,” he added.

Amazon said its delivery station initiatives are “designed to complement and empower our workforce.” The company has been ramping up automation across its operations, with more than a million robots now deployed in its fulfillment network and plans to more than double its fleet of robotic arms this year, citing goals to improve safety, ergonomics and efficiency.

The company has also opened a Last Mile Innovation Center in Germany, where it has been testing delivery station technologies including automated unloading, sorting, and scanning systems.

Washington is home to Mount Rainier, the Space Needle, and the Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks. It’s also now home to what the King County Library System says is North America’s largest library materials sorter — a $5.2 million installation in Renton that formally opened Wednesday to handle the 25,000 items circulating through KCLS’s 50 libraries every day.

The new warehouse has been running since June 14. It’s the culmination of a more than three-year process. It replaces KCLS’s previous distribution center in Preston that operated for almost 25 years. Heidi Daniel, the organization’s executive director, said it was time to modernize: “It couldn’t keep pace with our growing community.” 

In 2025, KCLS’s 700,000-plus active cardholders checked out more than 11 million physical items and 12 million digital items. And while the previous sorter “served KCLS faithfully,” it was plagued by mounting maintenance needs and frequent breakdowns. “We were literally ordering parts off of eBay,” Daniel said.

KCLS said the new sorter can handle up to 8,000 items per hour at full tilt. 

Warehouse operations manager Charlie Mitchell walked through the sequence: drivers returning from branch pickups load totes onto one of two conveyor belts, and a pair of robotic arms at the far end destack them at a rate of one every 15 seconds. 

On an average day, Mitchell estimated that 800 to 900 totes could be received. A human worker scans each item individually, and that scan tells the system where the material goes next: onto a second belt and into one of 186 chutes where it’s packaged into a new tote for the next delivery run.

Rest assured, these books aren’t being destroyed after being scanned.

It took KCLS nearly four months to set up and install everything. The facility is run by a team of 13 people — six tasked with scanning library materials and seven who manage the back end, ensuring the new totes are filled and then setting them aside while they await delivery. 

When asked if it was challenging to train on the new equipment, Mitchell said no: “It’s a good job to pick up on.”

The clearest gains of this new setup, he said, are for the people working around the machine. Totes used to stack 14 levels high, sending workers up ladders to reach them; the new setup tops out at five, and instead of pushing totes down the line by hand, staff pulls them off onto a hand truck. 

The noise level dropped too. “The old system ran at about 89 decibels,” Mitchell said. “This [new sorter] runs at 67 decibels. It’s about the same as a vacuum cleaner.”

The other payoff shows up at the branches. Mitchell explained that the old sorter ran at 2 to 3 mph and put books in the wrong bin 1% to 2% of the time. While a low percentage, it sparked uncomfortable conversations with patrons who received an email saying their book was available for pickup. The new machine features automated tracking and destination redundancy support, likely reducing the odds of any mis-sorting.

King County Councilmember Steffanie Fain said the new facility solves a “major flaw” in the library system — at least according to her two young children: It will enable books to move through the system faster so people won’t have to wait as long anymore for the material they want to read, listen, or watch. 

“I’m not sure my kids have ever had an opinion about a distribution center before, but this one definitely has their full support,” she said.

“Today isn’t just about unveiling a remarkable piece of technology,” Daniel said. “It’s about investing in the future of KCLS, and most importantly, it makes a promise to the 1.6 million residents we are proud to serve: No matter where you live or which library you visit, you get the same selection, the same service, and the same speed.”