future of work

On 26 August 2026 Bill Gates published “A turbulent AI era — and critical choices to make”, a roughly six-thousand-word essay on Gates Notes, alongside interviews with Axios, GeekWire and MIT Technology Review. The technology industry’s most reliable optimist for fifty years now says the AI transition will be one of the most turbulent periods in human history, that the industry has already crossed every safety threshold it named for itself — bio, cyber, psychosocial, job destruction and control — and that no coordinated plan exists. This breakdown separates the essay from the headlines: the five thresholds and what crossing each one means, the three proposals Gates puts forward (new national and international institutions, a category of “Human Reserved” work kept for people, and a tax on AI tokens and robots), the numbers he attaches to them, his objection to the June 2026 executive order on model testing, what he says AI companions are doing to children, where he still expects AI to do more good than harm, and the questions he openly admits he has not answered. It closes with what a business buying AI this year should actually do about it.