Bill Gates says artificial intelligence will soon wipe out chronic shortages of skilled workers like doctors and teachers, eventually forcing societies to rethink the value of time and the concept of ‘work hours’.
What Happened: Speaking on Indian entrepreneur Nikhil Kamath’s “People by WTF” podcast, the Microsoft co‑founder predicted that “AI will have changed things enough that just this pure capitalistic framework probably won’t explain much” within two decades.
Robots with dexterous “hands” and large‑language models with “free intelligence,” he argued, will make it routine to staff hospitals, classrooms, and factory floors.
“We’ve always had a shortage — doctors, teachers, people to work in factories… those shortages won’t exist,” Gates said. “AI will come in and provide medical IQ, and there won’t be a shortage.”
His forecast stretches well beyond the office cubicle. Advances in vision, robotics, and language processing, he said, will let machines swing hammers on construction sites, scrub hotel rooms, and diagnose illnesses in rural clinics that struggle to attract physicians. With production constraints lifted, Gates expects shorter workweeks and earlier retirements to become feasible, adding, “It’s going to require almost a philosophical rethink about, ‘OK, how should time be spent?'” 
Gates acknowledged that a world of abundance is hard to picture for anyone who has “spent almost 70 years in a world of shortage,” but he urged economists to start mapping policies for an era when markets no longer ration scarce human labor. “My kids — and certainly my grandkids — a lot of their lives will be in that very changed world,” he said.
Why It Matters: Gates’ blueprint for doctor‑ and teacher‑level AI is hardly new. Back on The Today Show, he warned that mass automation could hand humanity so much “leisure time” that society will face a “‘Wow, what do we do with all that time?’ problem,” even as he celebrated pilot projects that already “enhance education” and streamline MRIs. In an older interview, Gates noted that the real near‑term upside of AI is “using it in a positive way, in areas like health and education … we’ll be experiencing increased productivity in a lot of areas,” repeating the very shortage‑busting logic he later shared with Kamath.
The Microsoft co‑founder drove the point home on The Tonight Show in March 2025, asking Jimmy Fallon, “Should we … just work like 2 or 3 days a week?” because AI will render once‑rare skills “commonplace” and, by extension, slash the traditional five‑day grind — a prospect he called “kind of profound” and “a bit scary.”
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