Bill Gates is a repugnant individual. He puts the ick in sick, the sin in sincere, and the con in concern. But rest assured, he cares deeply about your well-being and the future of the human race.
The bespectacled billionaire recently penned a remarkably revealing essay. The central message is that although AI is probably coming for your job, your social life, your education, your children, and perhaps your sanity, he has a plan.
This two-facedness is infuriating, but it’s an old trick.
Gates argues that AI “can substitute for human cognition” and that “many jobs will disappear forever.” He even says that if someone had a credible plan to slow AI globally, he would “likely support it.” But, conveniently, he immediately concludes that this isn’t “going to happen,” so we’d better learn to live with this rather depressing reality.
And who helped build the world in which this revolution became possible? Gates’ own Microsoft is now one of the biggest players in AI. Gates acknowledges that he still has “financial ties to” the tech industry, then assures us his views aren’t motivated by money. Believing that takes a level of blind faith usually reserved for doomed cults.
The giveaway is his proposed solution.
Meet “Human Reserved,” a tiny tax-bracket sanctuary where some of us get to exist like protected wildlife. Don’t save work because human beings deserve meaningful lives; reserve some jobs because society still needs people employed. Although Gates talks about the “broader value of work,” the argument keeps circling back to stability, government funds, and the social consequences of mass unemployment.
That’s the true nightmare keeping him up at night. Starving people don’t splurge, and desperate people tend to break things. His concern is not that lives will be ruined, but that an economy without paychecks stops consuming. He wants us to revere him as a high-minded public intellectual, yet he operates like a landlord calculating how much mold a tenant will tolerate. He advocates for AI taxes and automation caps with one hand while funding the companies behind the technology with the other. Preserving a few human roles in nursing homes and kindergartens is less an act of mercy than a recognition that a fully automated world could harm his bank balance.
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He notes rather glibly that he likes the phrase “Human Reserved” because it makes him “think of nature reserves.” In his eyes, human labor is no longer an organic expression of dignity, purpose, or community. Instead, it’s more like an endangered species trapped inside a fenced-off sanctuary, permitted to exist solely because the park ranger feels an odd burst of sentimentality. He treats working-class survival like a protected wetland. Essentially, a scenic spot where we could build data centers, but we choose not to because the sight of total extinction gives him a slight headache. It’s the ultimate condescension: an absolute elitist granting us a small, artificial habitat to graze in while he clears the rest of the forest for his server farms.
Shortly after his patronizing essay was published, word emerged that Gates is actively arranging a trip to Beijing to meet personally with Xi Jinping.
The Manchurian candidate
China spends millions of dollars every day running continuous cyber operations against American infrastructure, stealing military IP, and breaching government servers. Yet this supposedly great American philanthropist wants to help the Chinese Communist Party navigate the risks of the very technology it actively weaponizes. He plays the homegrown hero, preaching the need to protect American workers and secure the nation, while simultaneously plotting to help a strategic rival become more powerful. Gates wants to discuss global safety standards with an authoritarian regime, acting as a self-appointed shadow secretary of state.
This two-facedness is infuriating, but it’s an old trick in the slimy septuagenarian’s playbook.
In the 1990s, when the Department of Justice dragged Microsoft into federal court for using its desktop monopoly to strangle Netscape Navigator, the world got a front-row seat to the real Bill Gates. The trial exposed a savvy street fighter who treated entire software sectors like nuisance weeds in his garden. Rather than outcompeting his rivals, he wanted to cut off their oxygen supply. He spent that decade playing the ruthless corporate terminator, extracting tribute from every PC sold on earth, and turning the free market into his personal fiefdom.
When the antitrust hammer finally came down, he didn’t change his nature. But he did change his wardrobe. He swapped the courtroom depositions for knitted sweaters and rebranded overnight as America’s doting uncle. But the killer instinct never vanished. The same instinct that drove him to annihilate competing web browsers now drives him to carve up the future of global technology with Beijing, ensuring that he controls the rules of the game no matter which superpower wins.
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This is not an exaggeration. Xi has described Gates as an “old friend” — indeed, his “first American friend.” A friend of China is no friend of America. And Bill Gates, a man actively liquidating the livelihoods of the domestic workforce while offering to manage their post-economic survival, is certainly no ally of the everyday, decent, hardworking American.
Gates wants software algorithms to process trade decisions, draft legal documents, write code, and manage logistics chains. In exchange, he generously offers to let humans retain a few low-margin positions in elder care and education. How kind of him.
Those specific fields survived his filter for an obvious reason. Software can’t change a physical diaper or offer genuine affection to an aging patient. He frames these designated human roles as an act of moral generosity, when he’s actually just identifying the physical tasks that robots can’t perform.
Only the most foolish would mistake his ruthless risk management for human compassion, and only the most foolish would believe that Bill Gates cares at about our well-being.
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