Vincent: “Once You Become Famous, You Can Say Whatever Kind of Stupid Shit and Get an Article Written About It”

This week, Bill Gates went on a podcast and suggested that some people, faced with artificial intelligence, might simply choose to live “like the Amish.” Within hours it was everywhere. Polymarket made a graphic. Strangers on LinkedIn reacted with lightbulb emojis. Somewhere, a horse was put on alert.

It is worth remembering how we got here.

In the spring of 2023, Gates told a room full of education investors that AI chatbots would be teaching children to read within eighteen months. That was more than three years ago. The children are still learning to read from tired adults with flashcards. A few weeks later, he announced that personal AI agents would make search engines and online shopping obsolete. “You’ll never go to Amazon,” he said. Amazon, for its part, went on existing.

By 2025, the forecast had grown. On The Tonight Show, Gates told Jimmy Fallon that humans would not be needed “for most things,” and that we might all be working two days a week within a decade. Sports were safe, he explained, because nobody wants to watch computers play baseball. The audience applauded. Why? Why would you do that? Now he’s going to say more.

Then the internet decided he had named the only three jobs that would survive AI: coders, biologists and energy experts. Everyone else was free to go. Then he said AI was moving faster than even he expected, and that nobody could really say whether it would replace us in one year or in ten.

Then 2026 arrived and the mood darkened. In August he wrote that he would support a plan to slow AI down, then added that it was not going to happen. In September he said there had never been a weapon as powerful as AI in the wrong hands, and that it could cost a billion lives. And now, in October, the Amish.

Every single one of these got headlines. Not because any of it made sense, but because he once sold a lot of Windows, and we never stopped writing down what he says.

To be fair, he may well have been brilliant at some point. Vincent would know. He worked for the guy for five years and was, by his own account, terrible at it. Whether he helped him make money or cost him money is still up for debate.

Asked for comment this week, Vincent said: “Once you become famous, you can say whatever kind of stupid shit and get an article written about it.”

Dobuki News has written the article.

And you read it.

— Dobuki News