Excerpts:

Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, is loudly warning that artificial intelligence poses a grave threat to jobs and human life, and that urgently addressing the risks should be “the world’s top priority.”

In an hourlong interview with The New York Times last week, Mr. Gates said the tech industry was knowingly downplaying those threats because there was too much money on the line.

“In private, people who understand how good this stuff is, and how much better it’s getting, they’re very worried,” he said. But few tech executives, Mr. Gates said, are willing to publicly admit that. “They’re now saying to each other: ‘Hey, man, don’t say that. It’s bad for us — the next trillion dollars we’re trying to raise.’”

On Wednesday, Mr. Gates published a nearly 6,000-word essay on his personal website laying out his concerns about A.I. and offering solutions, such as new taxes and bans. He said he was motivated to speak now because recent improvements in A.I. had far surpassed his expectations and because the industry had ignored technology milestones — like A.I.’s escaping the control of its creators or making recipes for bioweapons — that it once said would warrant more caution.

“The irony of ‘innovation lover is scared and says we’re not ready and we’re crossing thresholds,’ maybe it’s even more poignant,” he said.

Mr. Gates said technological advances had truly stunned him three times: In 1980 when he first saw a graphical user interface, which led to the modern personal computer. In 2022 when the leaders of OpenAI came to his house to demonstrate what would soon become ChatGPT. And this year when he looked closely at the advances being made by Claude Code, Anthropic’s A.I. tool.

Coding, Mr. Gates said, is the subject he knows best, and Claude’s abilities shocked him. “The idea that now these things are in a meaningful sense better than I am is like: What the hell?” he said.

Technological breakthroughs in the past created more jobs than they eliminated, Mr. Gates said. But he is in disbelief that industry boosters say that will happen again this time.

The A.I. era is “utterly, absolutely, completely, totally different,” he said. He acknowledged that this unpopular opinion (in tech circles) was “a hell of a claim, and I’m staking everything I know — everything — saying, ‘Are you kidding?’”

He said mass job losses, if not addressed, were inevitable because A.I. would spread across the economy and leave little room for one industry to absorb the refugees from another. The biggest tech companies in the world, including Microsoft, are racing to help corporate customers adopt A.I., which could replace many workers.

Mr. Gates said that companies were just responding to market incentives, but that those incentives might conflict with what was best for society.

He proposed a new tax on A.I. use, known as a “token tax,” to make it more expensive to replace people and provide money to help those who do lose work. A token is a basic unit of A.I. computing. The idea of taxing it has gained some traction, including on Wall Street, as a way to increase the cost of using machines instead of human labor.

He argued for new international agreements to set clear criteria to monitor and restrict extreme risks like bioterrorism. He said it could take only a few people with access to advanced A.I. to develop new pathogens.

He said he would happily debate anyone who argued against mandatory reviews of any A.I. system that could be weaponized to make new molecules and unleash a pandemic. Mr. Gates added that he was dumbfounded by the kind of voluntary measures that the White House and industry leaders were developing.

“Self-regulation on the most dangerous tool ever invented?” he said incredulously. “No, thanks!”

Mr. Gates said he was in a “state of shock” as to why there was not more urgency on these issues.

Along with global health issues, Mr. Gates vowed to make his A.I. concern part of every conversation he had with world leaders. “I only have two issues where I’m going to say, ‘Please think more about this, please care more about this,’” he said.

Mr. Gates acknowledged that he was in an odd spot: He has arguably done as much as anyone in the world to evangelize for and shape the modern computer industry. But now he is warning that the technology it is creating presents global risks.

“I don’t like bringing bad news to people, and I don’t like saying that innovation may be a net negative,” he said. “But that’s where we are.”


Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/bill-gates-ai-risks.html

I can predict the people who will be pushing for a hold on AI in the US while our enemies plow ahead for permanent, world changing advantage.

The most likely outcome is not that AI simply “takes over” in a single dramatic event. It’s that AI progressively takes over more of the cognitive and organizational work that societies currently require humans to perform. That could be as consequential as industrialization—possibly much more so.

I’d frame the plausible futures as several scenarios that can overlap and evolve into one another.

1. AI-augmented capitalism — most likely in the near term

Over roughly the next 5–15 years, AI probably becomes embedded in nearly every profession rather than immediately eliminating most professions.

Doctors still practice medicine, but AI performs diagnosis and documentation. Engineers supervise AI-generated designs. Programmers increasingly describe systems rather than manually write them. Managers use AI agents to coordinate work. Manufacturing becomes increasingly autonomous.

The important distinction becomes:

People who use AI replace people who don't use AI before AI replaces people altogether.

Productivity could rise dramatically, but wealth could become considerably more concentrated because ownership of AI systems, computing infrastructure, energy, robotics and intellectual property becomes extraordinarily valuable.

This is probably the transition period we are entering now.


---

2. The "Great Displacement"

Eventually AI may become better than humans at enough economically valuable cognitive tasks that there simply aren't enough new human jobs to replace the old ones.

Historically:

> technology replaced tasks, but created new human tasks.



Advanced AI potentially breaks that cycle because it can learn the new tasks too.

Suppose an AI eliminates accounting jobs and society creates "AI accounting supervisors." The next generation of AI may supervise the accounting AIs itself.

Robotics eventually brings the same phenomenon into physical labor.

That produces a profound economic problem:

If labor is no longer scarce, why would employers pay humans for it?

At that point governments probably have to decouple income from employment through some combination of universal basic income, negative income taxes, social dividends, sovereign AI funds or public ownership of portions of AI-generated productivity.

That would represent one of the largest changes to capitalism since industrialization.


---

3. The abundance society

This is the optimistic trajectory.

AI + robotics + cheap energy could dramatically reduce the cost of producing many things.

Imagine automated agriculture, autonomous transportation, robotic construction, AI-designed medicines, automated manufacturing, personalized education and extremely cheap intellectual labor.

Human civilization moves from:

labor → wages → consumption

toward something closer to:

automated production → distributed abundance → human activity

Humans would still compete over inherently scarce things—land, status, unique experiences, relationships, collectibles—but basic material survival might require remarkably little human labor.

In that world, the central problem isn't unemployment.

It's purpose.

For thousands of years society has implicitly told people:

> Your occupation is a large part of who you are.



A post-work civilization would have to invent a different answer.

Art, family, science, exploration, sports, craftsmanship, philosophy, community and games might become much more important.


---

4. AI oligarchy

There's a darker version of the same technological abundance.

Instead of AI productivity being broadly distributed, ownership remains highly concentrated.

A relatively small number of corporations, investors and governments control AI models, robots, energy and computational infrastructure.

Most people aren't starving; governments probably provide enough resources to maintain social stability.

But economic mobility collapses.

Society could begin resembling a technologically sophisticated version of feudalism:

AI/robot owners → enormous productive wealth

everyone else → consumers receiving transfers

The danger here isn't necessarily poverty.

It's loss of agency.

Someone might have entertainment, food, housing and healthcare while possessing remarkably little influence over the economic system producing them.

This is one of the futures I think deserves considerably more attention.


---

5. The AI surveillance state

AI gives governments capabilities that previous authoritarian regimes could only dream about.

Mass facial recognition, automated propaganda, behavioral prediction, financial monitoring, autonomous drones and analysis of essentially every digital communication could make populations extraordinarily easy to monitor.

Historically, authoritarian governments eventually encountered a scaling problem: there simply weren't enough secret police to watch everyone.

AI removes that limitation.

At the extreme, governments could identify potential dissent before organized dissent occurs.

Democratic societies therefore face an important institutional challenge: AI capable of protecting citizens can often also be used to monitor them.

China and liberal democracies could become competing experiments in how AI governance develops.


---

6. The AI-managed society

There's another possibility that is neither obviously utopian nor dystopian.

Humans gradually hand more decisions to algorithms simply because the algorithms make better decisions.

AI allocates traffic. AI manages electrical grids. AI determines medical treatments. AI designs tax policy. AI recommends economic policy. AI manages supply chains. AI evaluates legislation.

Eventually politicians might technically remain in charge while asking AI:

> "What policy produces the best outcome?"



If the AI is consistently right, ignoring it becomes politically difficult.

Human government could slowly become something like:

democratic goal-setting + machine optimization.

Humans decide what society values.

Machines determine how best to achieve it.

The philosophical problem is enormous because optimization always requires defining what counts as "better."


---

7. Human-AI integration

Another possibility is that the distinction between humans and AI becomes increasingly artificial.

Today we carry smartphones.

Tomorrow we may wear persistent AI assistants.

Later there could be augmented-reality interfaces, neural interfaces, artificial memory systems and eventually direct brain-computer communication.

At that point the question changes from:

"Will AI surpass humans?"

to:

"What exactly counts as a human?"

A biologically ordinary person competing against someone with perfect AI memory, instantaneous translation and direct access to machine intelligence would face an enormous disadvantage.

Civilization could eventually split between augmented and non-augmented humans.


---

8. Superintelligence

This is the enormous wildcard.

If AI reaches human-level general intelligence and can substantially improve AI research itself, technological development might accelerate beyond our ability to predict.

An intelligence significantly beyond humans could potentially transform medicine, physics, materials science, energy and engineering.

But it introduces the alignment problem:

What happens when something more intelligent than humanity pursues objectives that aren't quite the objectives humanity intended?

The frightening scenarios don't require an evil AI.

A sufficiently powerful system that is merely indifferent to human welfare could be dangerous.

This ranges from manageable failures to the extreme possibility of human extinction.

The probability is fiercely debated, but the magnitude of the consequence makes it impossible to dismiss.


---

What I think is most likely

Rather than one scenario, I suspect civilization moves through a sequence something like:

2025–2035

AI augmentation
↓
Major productivity increases
↓
White-collar disruption
↓
Increasing concentration of capital

2035–2050

AI agents + increasingly capable robotics
↓
Large-scale labor displacement
↓
Political conflict over distribution
↓
Experiments with UBI/social dividends
↓
Increasing AI involvement in government

2050+

At that point prediction becomes extremely unreliable.

But the fundamental fork may look something like:

AI productivity

↙︎　　　　　　　　　↘︎
Concentrated ownership　Broad ownership
↓　　　　　　　　　　　↓
AI oligarchy　　　　　Abundance economy
↓　　　　　　　　　　　↓
Dependency　　　　　 Post-work society

And superintelligence sits outside this diagram because it could radically alter either branch.

The issue underneath all of this

I actually think AI eventually creates a problem even deeper than economics.

For most of civilization, human existence has been organized around scarcity.

We struggle to obtain food, shelter, security, knowledge and status. That struggle structures our lives.

AI and automation potentially eliminate enormous amounts of that struggle.

Which creates a strange paradox:

> Humanity may eventually become extraordinarily good at satisfying human needs while simultaneously undermining many of the things that gave human life structure and meaning.



That connects remarkably well with the question at the heart of Coping with Consciousness: once an intelligent being no longer has to spend most of its existence struggling merely to survive, what exactly should consciousness do with itself?

In that sense, the AI revolution may ultimately be less about machines becoming intelligent and more about humans having to decide what intelligence—and human life—are actually for.

Purchasing decisions re: Sellers who are misusing AI technology.

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I n- redacted pages, photos, etc.

Meanwhile, BG is spot on with his call…which would ultimately benefit you and your family…think about it.