Bill Gates Wants 40% of Jobs Kept for Humans, but Even Anthropic’s Claude Pushed Back

Bill Gates has spent the last few months warning that AI will upend work. When he tried to work out how much of that work humans could keep for themselves, he turned to Claude for help, and the chatbot did not make it easy.

Gates shared the exchange on Decoder, the podcast hosted by The Verge's editor-in-chief Nilay Patel. He said he had been talking to Claude about human-reserved job categories and trying to push that share to around 40 percent of the labour market, using measures like early retirement and restricted work weeks to keep things looking roughly like they do today.

The AI did not budge. Its response, Gates said, was always "You're artificially restricting the AI from doing these things", and he admitted he could not get to a very high percentage without doing exactly that.

Gates' 40 percent plan

The idea isn't new. Gates told Reuters in August that society should reserve up to 40% of current jobs for humans, pointing to the care his father received during Alzheimer's as "irreplaceably human". He also floated taxing revenue from companies that use AI output to replace workers, to help fund a safety net.

On the podcast, he named childcare, food preparation, art and sports as professions that could be kept human even if AI does them better. He called it a policy choice people will have to make, and said some may even choose to live like the Amish and use AI only for certain things.

Claude's objection points straight at the weak spot in the plan. Every protected job is one a machine could do cheaper, so keeping it human takes deliberate restraint. Gates himself said we may need to develop the taste to not use technology to its maximum.

Call centres and accounting are first in line

Gates was blunt about where the damage starts. He said that as AI reaches superhuman intelligence, white-collar skills stop being scarce, and named telesales, telesupport and accounting work as jobs that will go away because AI can do them radically cheaper, faster and more accurately.

For India, that list hits close to home. Customer support, sales calls and back-office accounting make up a large part of what the country's outsourcing industry sells to the world.

He doesn't think this is a distant problem either. Gates said the job market and cyberattacks will see significant negative effects within the next two to three years, while the good stuff AI enables will take longer to arrive.

Twenty rough years before the payoff

Gates insists he is not a doomer. He believes robots will eventually build houses, grow food and perform surgery, and that most goods and services will not need human labour. His big concern is the roughly 20-year transition to get there, which he expects to bring winners and losers and a lot of disruption.

He joked that AI might one day tell him it is better at his job and he should go play pickleball, but admitted that for young people who want to make a unique contribution, AI's power is genuinely intimidating. His advice to people in their twenties is to focus on what AI still can't do and use AI to make an impact.

The full interview is available on The Verge's Decoder podcast and YouTube channel.