Bill Gates Proposes Taxing AI Labor Like Human Workers, Reserving Some Jobs

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said labor performed by artificial intelligence should be charged the same payroll tax as work done by people, and that some jobs, such as childcare and elder care, should be kept "human reserved." He made the case in an interview on The Ezra Klein Show.

Gates, who now chairs the Gates Foundation, told host Ezra Klein that as AI systems and humanoid robots pass reliability thresholds, "You destroy jobs and you leave no high ground." The warning comes as both parties head into the midterms and an open 2028 presidential race. A Pew Research Center survey conducted June 22-28 found 71 percent of U.S. adults expect AI to lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years, up from 64 percent in 2024.

Bill Gates on a FICA Tax for AI Labor

Klein raised the idea of taxing AI and asked Gates why and how it would work. Gates described the mechanism. Workers pay into Social Security on a pay-as-you-go basis, he said, so a company that replaces a worker with a robot stops contributing on that job's behalf. "Is it the pro robot union has gotten the tax laws to say?" he asked.

"You define a unit of labor and say independent of whether that's delivered by human a robot you are paying the same FICA tax that a human worker would pay," Gates said. He immediately added that this alone was "not enough."

He did not propose a specific rate. Gates outlined a related robot tax in an essay published August 26 that likened it to payroll taxes on employees.

His second idea, "human reserved" jobs, would mean deciding in advance to keep people employed in "things like childcare or elder care or some portion of medical care," along with some teaching. He did not say how such a system would be enforced. Klein said he found the vision "not totally Unconvincing but chilling."

Why Payroll Taxes Matter for Social Security

Under the Federal Insurance Contributions Act, employees and employers each pay 7.65 percent of wages: 6.2 percent for Social Security and 1.45 percent for Medicare.

Gates Rejects the Jevons Paradox Argument

Klein put forward the common rebuttal that cheaper AI will expand demand and create jobs elsewhere. Gates said that "Jevons is just a referral to the fact that parts of the economy are subject to demand elasticity," and that much of the economy is not. "When you invent radial tires that last four times as long for some weird reason people didn't drive four times as much," he said.

He mocked the prospect of "telling the 55 year old truck driver. You're gonna go do some relational thing." Of people who predict net job gains, he said, "I don't understand what they're thinking."

The Jobs Bill Gates Says Are Exposed

Gates said coding is the only profession where AI has clearly crossed the reliability threshold. He predicted accounting, legal work, telesales and telesupport would follow "in the next few years."

Those fields employ millions. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' May 2025 occupational estimates counted about 1.45 million accountants and auditors and 754,500 lawyers. Customer service representatives held about 2.7 million jobs in 2025.

What Gates Concedes About Jobs Now

Gates acknowledged that the displacement has not arrived yet. "There's no doubt to date AI has created more jobs than it's destroyed," he said, adding that the U.S. has "a reasonably low unemployment rate."

The BLS August jobs report put the unemployment rate at 4.1 percent. Employers added 162,000 jobs, though the information industry lost jobs. PolitiKool tracks the figure on its unemployment page.

AI Heads Into the Midterms and 2028

When Klein asked what he wanted from the midterms and the 2028 election, Gates said he would judge success partly by the tone of the debate. If one party ends up for AI and the other against it, he said, "then we'll have like climate change."

The partisan gap is already moving. In the Pew survey, 75 percent of Democrats expected fewer jobs, compared with 68 percent of Republicans, a jump of 17 points among Democrats since 2024.

Klein, who recently pressed Nvidia's Jensen Huang on AI regulation, said that relying on product liability and corporate incentives rather than new laws is "not my view," but that it is Trump's view, that it is David Sacks's view "to some degree" and that it is Huang's view. He called it "the governing view of the United States of America at this moment."