Bill Gates: Within 10 years, AI will replace many doctors and teachers—humans won’t be needed ‘for most things’
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/26/bill-gates-on-ai-humans-wont-be-needed-for-most-things.html
Bill Gates: Within 10 years, AI will replace many doctors and teachers—humans won’t be needed ‘for most things’
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/26/bill-gates-on-ai-humans-wont-be-needed-for-most-things.html
43 Comments
From the article
Over the next decade, advances in artificial intelligence will mean that humans will no longer be needed “for most things” in the world, says [Bill Gates](https://www.cnbc.com/bill-gates/).
That’s what the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist told comedian Jimmy Fallon during an interview on NBC’s [“The Tonight Show” in February](https://www.nbc.com/the-tonight-show/video/bill-gates-joked-with-steve-jobs-about-taking-the-wrong-lsd-talks-ai-and-optimism-for-the-future/NBCE109189964). At the moment, expertise remains “rare,” Gates explained, pointing to human specialists we still rely on in many fields, including “a great doctor” or “a great teacher.”
But “with AI, over the next decade, that will become free, commonplace — great medical advice, great tutoring,” Gates said.
In other words, the world is entering a new era of what Gates called “free intelligence” in an [interview last month](https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/02/harvard-bill-gates-ai-and-innovation) with Harvard University professor and happiness expert Arthur Brooks. The result will be rapid advances in AI-powered technologies that are accessible and touch nearly every aspect of our lives, [Gates has said](https://www.gatesnotes.com/The-Age-of-AI-Has-Begun), from improved medicines and diagnoses to widely available [AI tutors](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/15/bill-gates-ai-tutors-will-be-like-a-great-high-school-teacher.html) and [virtual assistants](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/16/bill-gates-ai-agents-could-change-how-we-live-our-lives.html).
Nah, dawg. That’s obviously wishful thinking.
Remind me! 10 years
Be looking for Microsoft to make some major AI announcements and pump their stock.
Even if they are great tutors, and excellent at giving advice on how to improve, are the AIs also going to supervise? Go on field trips? Run extra curricular sports, etc? They might be great additions to the educational landscape (might being the keyword) but I doubt they’ll entirely replace us.
Also, Bill Gates – **640K is more memory than anyone will ever need**.
What good is a great AI tutor if all the jobs you would get tutored for are being done by AI?
there wont be most things because no more people that can pay things. lmao.
Man, Bill Gates is really good at wording things so that grifters can easily use out of context.
If people didn’t fucking suck, this would be great. We could spend our time making art and seeing beautiful places while working the bare minimum and being paid enough to enjoy ourselves while robots do the real work. Instead, AI will take jobs, and people are gonna have trouble feeding and housing themselves.
Very cool.
I could see medical AI reviewing charts, taking a history from a patient, and even ordering labs/imaging/diagnostics. I could see it also interpreting those diagnostics and recommending treatments. **But I feel like all of that would still have to be signed off by a real doctor.**
How would physical exam be performed? Prob by a real doctor.
And procedures? I have a hard time believing AI is going to be doing procedures anytime soon. This is the biggest thing that gives me a sense of job security. That and the human element is crucial to medicine.
“Think of how great it’ll be after we’re all freed from menial and unfulfilling labor we can be painters, poets, philosophers, and sculptors!”
“Oh fuck AI took all the artsy fartsy jobs too? Well just be happy to be party to your own demise like I’ve been.”
Ahh yah, nobody will know how to be an expert in anything because computers will be running everything.
This is just a dumb take (probably taken out of context) – and it is dangerous too. The promise should be that doctors will be able to do more not that they will be replaced by robots.
Like our overlords will allow us access to free intelligence.
After all, it is a sin to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
What a stupid claim.
Has he learned nothing over the last 5 years?
People don’t even trust their own local news stations anymore. You think they’re gonna trust AI to tech their kids and diagnose their health issues?
I think we’re going to see an interesting niche where markets emerge that push the use of costumer-facing real humans and organic ideas as a marketing tactic. Everyone else uses fake shit – so choose us we still employ real people.
Was he threatening this from his space base before demanding 100 trillion dollars from the world’s governments?
Gates has actively been trying to replace teachers long before AI came along
This is when they realise they do not need so many humans consuming resources and start culling us with T800s.
If we are really not needed…
…Should we even exist…?
Humans will need income to provide revenue for companies using AI, if AI takes all the jobs it starves itself to death.
I wonder how much the half-life of facts would impact on these systems, it’s also fully ignoring how much info professions such as doctors get from looking at how a patient behaves to figure out a problem that the patient is either hiding or is unaware was related to something.
I know that in my field of IT, just how a room feels can lead me to suspect something is up in a server room.
And, in this imaginary world of his, “superfluous” people will be left to starve. The vast majority of people will just willingly accept that they are no longer needed, and explain to their children, with bellies distended from hunger, that this is what is best for “society.”
The people will certainly not feel the need to rise up, put every fucking billionaire to the sword, and take back he automation that *our class* built, to at last serve to the benefit of mankind, and no longer for the benefit of the few who stole everything they ever had from us in the first place.
Seriously, Bill is a moron.
I have to add, maybe 10 years is a dumb prediction, but the day is coming when we have machines and AI capable of replacing most human labor. Capitalism is not compatible with such automation. This new age calls for new systems of economic distribution.
And the capitalists will never go for that. They will shut millions of people at a time out of the economy, and force politicians to play dumb, like the problem is so insurmountable.
The answer is to eliminate billionaires, and probably max out wealth accumulation in the $100M range. The earth can’t survive their destructive hybrid, and soon, neither will we. Workers must own the means of production, and that includes automated systems.
Why do people on Reddit have this idea that we would be able to restructure the entire planet at the same time so that nobody would have to work
This sentiment makes much of what’s currently happening in the world make sense.
Great. I love it. I’ll go chill. Now send us some money, rich guys.
Anyone who uses AI in a professional setting knows it’s not going to replace those types of jobs for multiple decades if really ever at all 100%. It’s an assistant, not replacement. I worry the AI bubble burst will lead to a lost decade if anything.
People will be needed to moderate and review what a.i is dishing out. cars will have camera’s inside and out and people will be moderating.
Excellent. This gives me plenty of time to troll others on social media…
This is the last call for the working class to seize the means of production. Failing to do so will leave the oligarchs in control of the fully automated economy. You know the oligarchs will fire everyone to starve to death. Last call, this is not a simulation!
Well, I guess AI will have to buy most of the garbage this new economy will produce…
Maybe university teachers will be replaced, but not primary and secondary teachers. A computer can’t do classroom management or the other social things that teachers do to run a classroom.
This narrative is dumb, teaching is a deeply human activity. It makes sense that a genius that likely was smarter in 4th grade than most of his teachers would discount the value and impact of teachers on student learning. I watched my kids during COVID, you can’t translate the energy and motivation an in person teacher provides to non-college age classes. Unless the AI is embodied kids will not learn from a screen on their own and almost certainly not primarily.
Unfortunately, if this is true then it will result in devastating nefarious activities within the same timeframe.
Wall-E was such a lovely commentary on this kind of thinking
AI is going to replace Art first before doctors and teachers.
Unless we get actual General Intelligence, not LLMs or other Generative Algorithms, this is just a disaster waiting to happen.
You need new input. You need new data to reflect the changing world, otherwise the model “loses touch” insanely fast.
Where does new data in the medical field come from? Researchers. But they don’t operate in a vacuum or just spawn into existence fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. They work hand in hand with general practitioners, surgeons and specialists to get info which drives the direction of their research. They get their experience and much of their knowledge through being a practitioner.
So if we push to replace doctors, we end up with a stagnant system and we gut out ability to improve or adapt to changes.
In the future, elites like this guy will be enjoying their life in a safe, comfortable zone while the rest of the obsolete humans will live in squatters.
His punk-ass has been pushing to replace teachers with computers since the ’80s. All the money he and Jobs and others bilked from us over decades, pushing horrendous drill and kill programs on school kids. For the longest time, it was so ineffective. The best learning apps today are still broadly ineffective at teaching students. They just keep pushing it on us, and politicians and school administrators rarely say no. I suppose we will have AI teachers (IIRC, some schools in Arizona are giving it a go already). We’ll see how it goes.
Yeah, that isn’t how teaching works. Educators are not just knowledge transferring machines. We are equal part creative artists, content area specialists, mandated reporters, and child developmental specialists as it applies to crafting developmentally appropriate content that fits within their ZPD. Nothing is easy when trying to engage the adolescent mind, and sometimes it just takes building a connection with a student based on mutual respect and understanding to facilitate deep learning, which could never be achieved via AI.
I think the main type of human that isn’t needed are these ultra wealthy, condescending nerds
That means either universal basic income or a great depression and revolt. They never think about how people will be able to afford goods in a consumption economy.
The irony that human ourselves are contributing to our future job losses by training AI.
Under a socialist mode of production this would be heaven on earth. Under capitalism this will
be hell.
Without Universal Basic Income, most people are completely fucked.