Human Reserved

Human Reserved refers to job categories set aside exclusively for humans, where replacing workers with AI would be legally banned.

Bill Gates proposed this idea in one of his essays, drawing a comparison to nature reserves. Just as nature reserves are areas legally protected from development or logging, Gates suggested designating certain jobs—like caregiving roles where human warmth is essential, or jobs held by people who would struggle to find other work if displaced—as zones where AI simply cannot cross.

The concept grows out of Gates's view that the job disruption AI will bring is different from past waves of technological change. Alongside a proposal to tax AI computing, he offered this human-only job designation as one way to respond to potential mass unemployment. No country has actually turned this into law or policy yet—it remains an idea at the proposal stage that is likely to spark debate going forward.

You might see it in a sentence like: 'His second proposal is a category of human-only jobs he calls Human Reserved.' It's important not to mistake this for a system already adopted by some company or government—it's a proposal and metaphor that Gates first put forward in his essay.