Did you catch Bill Gates’ recent chat with Ezra Klein? I didn’t, thankfully my washed colleague regularly reads NYT and sent it to me via Slack.
Many people are stuck on the part where he said AI is already at the point where it can “empower a bioterrorist to kill hundreds of millions,” but let’s brush past that because if that’s true, there’s nothing our hand-wringing can do to change it and this is a website about accounting, not tech-enabled bioterrorists. Let’s instead talk about the section where Ezra says this:
There’s another layer of risk that your essay talks quite a bit about, that A.I. really will take jobs from people.
Now, I know a lot of people debating this who say: No, the jobs are too messy. There was a prediction we’d have no more radiologists — we still have radiologists. A.I. can code, but we still have coders and strong demand for coders.
So tell me about why you think A.I. really will take jobs away from human beings at a significant scale.
And Bill says this:
So there’s no doubt that to date, A.I. has created more jobs than it’s destroyed. The demand for the skill sets, even just to build the data centers, is very, very high. We have a reasonably low unemployment rate.
The superiority of these systems is subject to a threshold where you have to believe that it’s incredibly reliable. If you’re going to have your telesales or telesupport capability be A.I.-driven, you want to make sure that its accuracy is better than humans.
And so the only profession where we’ve truly crossed over that threshold is coding. And even there, I know a lot of people who are kind of stuck in the past and don’t want to use the A.I. for coding. But managers of coders get that most applications can be developed very inexpensively.
We will, in the next few years, cross over those thresholds for accounting, legal work, telesales, telesupport — where there’s service 24 hours a day, in every language, with infinite trivia capability and no urgency.
Way to not answer the question, Bill. Anyway, he’s saying that within a couple years, AI will be fully empowered to deal with the most tedious of clients, 24/7, no matter how difficult the question. Then all you’ve got to do is convince them it’s worth it to pay to have a human in the mix anyway.
We’re a long way off from AI being able to autonomously handle even basic questions much less the full barrage of clients’ bullshit. Have you seen what’s happening to the America.gov chatbot? It loses its mind if you ask it to play Minecraft.
— Boyd (@0xBOYD) September 30, 2026
Any day now, guys. Any day now.
