AI is coming for your job, but don’t worry. According to tech pioneer, Microsoft founder, and philanthropist Bill Gates, this means you’ll have more leisure time to do what you want. Earlier this year, Bill Gates was promoting his biography, “Source Code”, and was asked a lot of questions about artificial intelligence and its impact on jobs. In an interview with Anant Goenka of The Indian Express, Gates said“We weren’t born to do jobs,” adding that society “won’t require everybody to work like they do today.”
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Gates also talked about AI changing the job landscape on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, asking rhetorically if humans should just be working two or three days a week. On his website, in a 2023 blog post about how agentic AI will change how the world works in the future, Gates wrote“Imagine that agents become so good that everyone can have a high quality of life without working nearly as much.”
Gates concedes that it sounds scary, but he says this is because humans are used to defining themselves by their jobs. Our worldview is defined by the shortage of accessible intelligence. “The reason you think about jobs is because of the shortages,” he said in his Indian Express interview. “Even that framing of how you think about the world won’t really be the way to think about it.” In interviews, including those with The Indian Express and on The Tonight Show, whenever Bill Gates was asked which jobs he thought AI would excel in, he almost always gave the same two examples: teachers and doctors.
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Bill Gates says AI doctors and teachers would benefit everybody
Doctors and teachers are a surprising choice for AI-replaceable professions. They both require lived experience, empathy, and compassion, which is something that humans have done better than machines up to now. Bill Gates’ vision for the future is based on the concept that while intelligence is currently relatively scarce, it will soon become abundant and free to use. “Intelligence will be completely free,” Gate said at a talk he gave at Harvard University, as reported by Harvard newspaper The Crimson. “The intelligence to do a medical diagnosis or design a new drug, and that is such an earth-shaking thing.”
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On The Tonight Show, he told Fallon“The era that we’re just starting is that intelligence is rare. You know, a great doctor, a great teacher. And with AI, over the next decade, that will become free, Commonplace, you know? Great medical advice, great tutoring. And it’s kind of profound because it solves all these specific problems, like we don’t have enough doctors or mental health professionals.”
Talking about problem-solving highlights why Gates is excited about the benefits AI can bring to teaching and medicine. The Gates Foundation, which he founded in 2000, has a stated mission to “help all people lead healthy, productive lives,” so he is keenly aware of current deficits. In 2023, he wrote on his website“Global health and education are two areas where there’s great need and not enough workers to meet those needs. These are areas where AI can help reduce inequity if it is properly targeted.”
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There are still hurdles to overcome before AI can do teachers’ and doctors’ jobs.
If you consider intelligence an objective and quantitative resource, as Bill Gates seems to, then it’s easy to follow his logic. If we can manufacture more intelligence, then there will be more of it to go around. However, this assumes that skilled doctors are rare due to a lack of human intelligence, without considering that many capable people simply lack access to training or need better pay or working conditions for the jobs they already do. The biggest hurdle with AI doctors and teachers would likely be people’s reluctance to engage with it. Gates acknowledges this, writing“People will need to see evidence that health AIs are beneficial overall, even though they won’t be perfect and will make mistakes.” This is something that Gates is probably all too aware of, given the mistakes that Microsoft made over the years.
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Many people advocate using tech to augment current healthcare and educational roles rather than replacing them entirely. On the Gates Foundation website, Senior Program Officer Asyia Kazmi offers practical solutions on how AI can transform education, including helping teachers with fewer resources and opportunities to develop and practice their skills, prepare lesson plans, and manage administrative tasks. She writes, “I believe it is the integration of technology into teachers’ work that will have the greatest impact.”
A 2023 study, “The AI Revolution in Education,” found that most students and teachers believe AI will not replace teachers due to its limitations in emotional intelligence, creativity, cultural sensitivity, and social-emotional development. Nurse.org, a nursing website, expressed a similar view. “Machines might assist,” it said, “but people will always want a human connection when they’re sick, scared, or vulnerable.”
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