“AI will be the greatest equalizer ever invented or the worst source of injustice.” The phrase is the moral axis of the manifesto, but it hides an aporia: for AI to equalize, someone has to pay the bill. And in today’s capitalism, that someone is rarely the one who benefits most.

There is one word Gates repeats again and again in his manifesto. It is not “intelligence,” not “risk,” not “employment.” It is “equity.” For a man who has devoted the second half of his life to global philanthropy, this obsession is not accidental. His foundation, which will spend its remaining 200 billion dollars over the next 19 years, has made equity its reason for being. But when Gates transfers that concern to AI, he meets a fundamental contradiction: AI is not intrinsically equalizing or unjust. It is a mirror of the society that creates it. And that society is profoundly unequal.

The rhetoric of equality

The famous dichotomy — “the greatest equalizer or the worst source of injustice” — is a powerful rhetorical figure. It works like a pendulum between hope and fear, forcing the reader to take a side. But Gates does not clarify what he means by “equalizer.” Does he mean equality of opportunity? Equality of results? The mere reduction of extreme poverty? The ambiguity is strategic: progressives can read “equal opportunity,” while conservatives can read “improvement without altering property structures.”

If we read carefully, Gates’s concept of equity unfolds on three levels. The first is access: ensuring that low-income countries and vulnerable communities can use AI tools. The second is protection: ensuring that those who lose their jobs have a safety net. The third is fiscal redistribution: taxing robots and tokens to finance retraining and subsidies. At no point does Gates propose a radical redistribution of ownership over the means of AI production or a change in capitalism’s incentive structure. His “equalization” is, in the end, digital welfare capitalism: market, but with bumpers.

The limit of philanthropy as a tool of equity

Gates trusts his foundation and collaboration with companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft to promote equity. But philanthropy, however generous, has a structural limit: its scale is tiny compared with the market. The Gates Foundation’s 200 billion dollars is astronomical for one individual, but it is barely 0.2% of U.S. GDP and a tiny fraction of global AI spending, estimated at more than one trillion dollars annually by 2026. Technology companies invest more in R&D in a quarter than the foundation can spend in a year on equity programs.

Philanthropy also operates through the logic of donation, not justice. Gates can pay for vaccines, agricultural advisers in Africa, and AI models translated into local languages. But he cannot prevent the same companies that collaborate with his foundation from selling surveillance systems to authoritarian governments, nor can he prevent AI profits from concentrating in Silicon Valley and Shenzhen. Philanthropy is a palliative, not a cure.

Gates is aware of this limitation. In the manifesto he writes that to maximize positive effects we must be deliberate in ensuring that AI benefits everyone and not just a few rich people. This will require governments and philanthropy to play a strong role. Notice the order: governments and philanthropy. But if governments do not act — and Gates says they are not acting — philanthropy is left alone. And alone, it is insufficient.

The geometry of global inequality

One issue Gates addresses honestly is the North-South gap. He notes that many AI models are trained in English and in Western cultural contexts. The foundation is working to make these models available in the languages of the countries where it operates, but the challenge is enormous: there are more than 7,000 languages in the world, and most lack the data corpora needed to train advanced language models.

But inequality is not only linguistic; it is infrastructural. A farmer in Kenya does not only need a model that advises him about seeds. He needs electricity, connectivity, a smartphone, and digital literacy. Gates mentions agriculture as the area where AI will have the fastest impact in low-income countries, and it is true that there are promising advances. But the gap between what is technically possible and what is materially accessible remains immense.

Here there is a blind spot in Gates’s analysis: the geopolitics of hardware. AI does not only need algorithms; it needs chips, servers, cooling, and energy. Advanced chips, such as those produced by TSMC or Nvidia, are concentrated in a handful of countries and subject to export restrictions. The technological war between the United States and China is creating a world of two AI ecosystems, and the Global South is trapped in the middle. Gates does not enter this terrain because it is not his specialty, but without it, any discourse on global equity is incomplete.

The necessary political imagination: beyond Gates

For AI to truly become an equalizer, measures Gates does not contemplate would be required. One would be a “technological sovereignty fund” financed by taxes on large technology companies and aimed at guaranteeing universal access to AI. Another would be the recognition of AI as a “global commons,” with open patents and mandatory open-source models for systems trained with public funds. A more radical measure would be the deprivatization of foundational AI models, treating them as essential infrastructure like water or electricity.

Gates does not go that far. His imagination is limited by his place in the world: he is a billionaire who believes in the regulated market, not in replacing the market. His manifesto is, in this sense, a transitional document: it no longer defends unleashed capitalism, but it still does not embrace a post-capitalist logic.

The risk of technological determinism

Finally, there is a risk in how Gates frames the dilemma. By saying that AI will either equalize or deepen injustice, he risks technological determinism: the idea that technology has an inevitable effect on society. History shows that technology is malleable. The same printing press that spread the Bible also spread revolutionary pamphlets; the same electricity that illuminated factories also illuminated workers’ homes. AI is not destiny. It is an arena of political struggle.

Gates knows this, which is why he insists that solutions must be developed through a public democratic process. But that call remains suspended in the air if there is no social mobilization behind it. Without unions, citizen movements, and an organized public opinion, the democratic process is captured by pressure groups. Gates does not say this because his model of social change is technocratic: good leaders, good experts, good policies. But the history of great transformations is not written by technocrats; it is written by masses in conflict.

Provisional conclusion

Gates’s dichotomy is an excellent starting point, but it is a starting point, not an arrival. The question is not whether AI will be equalizing or unjust, but for whom and under what conditions. That question cannot be answered in an open letter, in a philanthropic foundation, or in a summit of world leaders. It is answered in the streets, in unions, in classrooms, and in citizen assemblies. Until that answer arrives, Gates’s manifesto will remain a brilliant warning, but also a mirror of our collective impotence.

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