Bill Gates, an expert on everything, proposes to tax robots and AI usage

Bill Gates would like a word about your job, your software, and the way the world is arranged.

The through-line is the same one it has been for years: he is available to supervise.

In an essay in August, and again on the Ezra Klein show at the end of September, Gates said companies should pay a payroll-style tax on robots and AI the way they pay it on people.

Fire the clerk, keep the model, and send the government a cut so the unemployed clerk can live.

He also wants some work set aside as “human reserved” - child care, elder care, bits of medicine and teaching - jobs the machine is not allowed to take even if it can.

Society, he said, gets to decide.

By society he means the offices, advised by people like him.

A few days earlier he told NBC that AI in the wrong hands is powerful enough to cause a billion deaths, that self-regulation is not enough, and that law enforcement and politicians need to get into the monitoring.

A kill switch is not enough either.

He would like a word with the president about it.

Then the line that gives the game away.

In mid-September, launching a Gates Foundation report, he warned that if AI is left to the market it “will be designed by and for the richest people in the world.”

The same week the foundation pledged $1 billion to expand access to AI, on the foundation’s terms.

One of the richest men alive, explaining that the danger is rich people designing the tool, while his own shop puts a billion dollars into designing who gets it.

None of this is a side hobby.

Software, vaccines, farming, schools, energy, the tax code, the jobs list, the casualty figures, the briefing for the White House.

The machines already have a power bill, a data center, and a crew.

What is missing, in this telling, is Bill Gates. How about he goes fishing.