A Human Way Back

Don’t let robots do this or that sort of work.

That is the rough idea behind Human Reserved, Bill Gates’s recent proposal to preserve certain roles for people even when artificial intelligence could perform them. His concern is prospective: how do we keep working people from being displaced and discarded?

My mind went to people our labour market has already discarded—or never found a way to receive.

For years, I’ve worked around homelessness and observed one of the most human forms of labour: being present and decent with someone lying on a sidewalk, living in a shelter, or struggling through addiction.

The need is everywhere, but the work is strangely scarce. Neighbours may avert their eyes. Transit employees, hospital staff, and other professionals encounter people in crisis but may lack the time, role, training, or trust required to reach them. Work that everyone encounters can become work that nobody owns.

Addiction can be difficult to comprehend without having lived through it. Someone who has survived it may recognize its rhythms, evasions, and possibilities differently.

Gates asks which jobs we should reserve from machines. I wonder which paths into work we should reserve for people whom ordinary hiring has already screened out.

Could we build supported job on-ramps—sometimes beginning with only a few accountable hours—for people able to understand and reach others whom our institutions find hardest to engage?

Hamilton offers one answer.

In a September 1 Globe and Mail report, Molly Hayes follows Madison Tatlock and Matthew Cheeseman through the halls of St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton. Three and a half years earlier, they had occupied those halls as patients in active addiction. Both had been homeless. Their baby was placed in foster care. Neither had worked in years, and both had criminal records.

Now they travel the same halls wearing hospital identification badges.

Tatlock and Cheeseman are paid members of a hospital-wide peer-support program for patients struggling with substance use. Those patients may have entered hospital for a heart attack, surgery, or another condition. But withdrawal, cravings, and distrust can interfere with their care—or cause them to leave before it is complete.

A peer worker may interrupt that sequence.

Sometimes the work begins with entering a room and saying: I have been there too. Peers take patients outside for cigarettes, help replace identification, connect people with services, and sometimes help them preserve their housing. The small team has logged more than 14,000 patient interactions since March 2025.

People who have navigated addiction, homelessness, recovery, and hospital care know this unusually difficult problem from the inside. Their experience can give them credibility with patients whom the institution struggles to reach. Hospital staff now seek their advice.

Credibility can produce trust. Trust may keep someone connected to care long enough for other help to work.

The peers also model a possible future. Tatlock does not merely tell another patient that change is possible. She walks into the room as evidence: someone once desperately unwell in the same hospital now returns as a colleague, parent, and paid professional.

Experience that carried stigma becomes expertise.
A person who needed help becomes someone able to give it.

The couple’s recovery began before this employment. The job did not rescue them. It gave recovery somewhere to go: into responsibility, income, purpose, and further learning. Tatlock has since enrolled part-time in a social-service-worker program.

Capability begins producing more capability.

None of this happens automatically. Lived experience is not by itself a qualification, and suffering should not become one. St. Joseph’s created paid positions within a team that includes physicians, social workers, and nursing support. Selection, training, responsibility, and institutional backing turned potential into accountable work.

Among the hundreds of people I know and continue to meet in and around shelters, I repeatedly encounter knowledge, energy, and social skill that ordinary job descriptions are not organized to receive. What is often missing is a supported job on-ramp for people who have become disconnected from ordinary employment: easier to enter, but leading to serious work.

Here, then, are two ambitions. Gates proposes a softer landing before displacement begins a downward spiral. Hamilton offers a possible path upward after exclusion has already compounded. After chronic use of emergency resources has already spiraled.

By choosing a path of growth, unusually wide spillovers may result. A worker gains income, rhythm, skills, and standing. A family gains stability. A patient encounters someone credible and may remain in care. A hospital may avoid another premature departure and its spillover, a more costly return. Recovery becomes visible to someone who cannot yet imagine it.

One path back becomes evidence of another.

The pilot has not proved every link in that chain, and its future funding remains uncertain. But it reveals a positive mechanism inside a field usually described through spirals of crisis, cost, and decline.

People widely treated as residual may possess useful capital that our institutions have not learned to recognize, develop, or employ.

Gates proposes work reserved for humans. Hamilton has begun building a human way back to work.

Where else might institutions create supported first steps into useful employment, or even engagement?

And which forms of work might do more than prevent a spiral; which might help reverse one?

Sources and notes

1. Bill Gates, “The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make are critical,” Gates Notes, 2026.
2. Molly Hayes, “For Hamiltonians battling addiction, peer support is a dose of empathy,” photographs by Laura Proctor, The Globe and Mail, September 1, 2026.