Bill Gates 'Human Reserved' - reserve decisions, not jobs
Bill Gates has published a thoughtful piece on governing the AI transition, and buried inside it is an idea I think we should reject.
He proposes what he calls "Human Reserved" work, writing that "as AI and robots improve, we'll set aside certain things for only people to do." The instinct behind it is humane, since he is trying to protect people from a labour shock that markets will not manage on their own, yet the policy itself would be a mistake.
Jobs are not moral categories; they are changing bundles of tasks that institutions happen to have grouped together at a particular moment. Once a government starts reserving occupations, it converts today's operating model into a legal artefact, protects incumbents against better ways of working, and eventually pays people to perform tasks that machines already do more reliably. That is employment theatre (’bullshit jobs’ as David Graeber might call it) rather than human dignity, and the people it claims to protect will know the difference.
What should be reserved for humans is accountability rather than activity. In care, education, justice, benefits and credit, a named person should remain answerable for consequential decisions, everyone affected should know when automation has been used, and there should be a right of appeal to someone with the authority to reverse the outcome. That protects human agency where it actually matters, without pretending every existing role deserves permanence.
None of this argues for removing people from care work, because in many settings the human relationship is the service rather than the delivery mechanism. The distinction I am drawing is that we should protect the relationship on the grounds that a person has a right to it, not protect a job on the grounds that an institution once organised itself that way.
If human dignity turns out to depend on shielding economically obsolete tasks from competition, then we have confused wages with worth and postponed the harder work, which is redesigning income, security and belonging for an era of abundant machine labour.
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