Get all your news in one place.
100’s of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
Tom’s Guide
Tom’s Guide
Technology
Scott Younker

Bill Gates just predicted the death of every job thanks to AI — except for these three

Bill Gates in 2019.

If you've been looking at the tech world for any longer than a few seconds, you've surely seen the seemingly sudden insistence that AI be inserted into every aspect of technology going forward.

AI has become both an overzealous marketing term and a reality that "artificial intelligence" is everywhere now and many are concerned that AI is going to be pushed to take people's jobs.

They may be right, according to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Recently, interviews from Gates have come back to the fore as the billionaire made several predictions about how work might look in the future.

A month ago, Gates went on the The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and said that AI would replace humans for most things.

"There will be some things we reserve for ourselves. But in terms of making things and moving things and growing food, over time those will be basically solved problems," Gates told Fallon.

Is it dead or thriving?

(Image credit: fotograzia / Getty Images)

Iterating on that concept, Gates has indicated that at least three jobs will need human hands over AI.

Despite reports and claims from a certain class of technologist (it's CEOs) that coding was going to become the domain of AI, Gates apparently believes that humans are essential to coding. In a different interview, he said that coders would need to understand the underlying layers of AI to determine whether it was working properly or acting "crazy stupid."

"It's kind of like saying, should you learn to multiply, just because computers are really good at it," Gates told Axios.

Gates added that he believes that human coders are essential to identifying and correcting errors, refining algorithms, and helping improve AI development.

The other two

(Image credit: Adobe Firefly/Future AI image)

Apparently, Bill Gates argues that while we could use AI to diagnose diseases and analyze DNA, it's "biologists" that will still be necessary for biological research and scientific discovery.

It's not clear why he singles out biologists specifically when it seems that entire line of thinking could be extrapolated to all scientific endeavors that require creativity in research and discovery.

Lastly, apparently, energy experts are third field exempt from an AI takeover because the billionaire has claimed the field is too complex to be fully automated.

As for the rest of us?

"Should we, you know, just work like 2 or 3 days a week?" Gates asked Fallon while saying that things like expert medical advice or educational resources will be cheap and available thanks to AI.

What we'll be doing during those "two or three days a week" is up for debate, but there is a sector of Silicon Valley that basically worships AI, and has been since at least 2017, so maybe we'll ended up as acolytes in the church of Godbot.

More from Tom's Guide

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.