Bill Gates: Robots That Displace Workers Should Be Taxed

Quartz, The Robot That Takes Your Job Should Pay Taxes, Says Bill Gates:

Robots are taking human jobs. But Bill Gates believes that governments should tax companies’ use of them, as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of automation and to fund other types of employment.

It’s a striking position from the world’s richest man and a self-described techno-optimist who co-founded Microsoft, one of the leading players in artificial-intelligence technology.

In a recent interview with Quartz, Gates said that a robot tax could finance jobs taking care of elderly people or working with kids in schools, for which needs are unmet and to which humans are particularly well suited. He argues that governments must oversee such programs rather than relying on businesses, in order to redirect the jobs to help people with lower incomes. The idea is not totally theoretical: EU lawmakers considered a proposal to tax robot owners to pay for training for workers who lose their jobs, though on Feb. 16 the legislators ultimately rejected it.

“You ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed” of automation, Gates argues. That’s because the technology and business cases for replacing humans in a wide range of jobs are arriving simultaneously, and it’s important to be able to manage that displacement. “You cross the threshold of job replacement of certain activities all sort of at once,” Gates says, citing warehouse work and driving as some of the job categories that in the next 20 years will have robots doing them.

AVC, The Robot Tax And Basic Income:

In my work to prepare for the Future of Labor conversation we had at NewCo Shift a few weeks ago, I talked to a number of experts who are studying job losses due to automation and thinking about what might be done about it. Two ideas that came up a number of times were the “robot tax” and the “basic income.”

The ideas are complimentary and one might fund the other.

At its simplest, a “robot tax” is a tax on companies that choose to use automation to replace human jobs. There are obviously many variants of this idea and to my knowledge, no country or other taxing authority has implemented a robot tax yet.

A “basic income” is the idea that everyone receives enough money from the government to pay for their basic needs; housing, food, clothing so that as automation puts people

What is interesting about these two ideas is that some of the biggest proponents of them are technology entrepreneurs and investors, the very people who are building and funding the automation technologies that have the potential to displace many jobs.

I would not characterized myself as a proponent of a robot tax or a basic income. But I find these ideas interesting and worth studying, debating, discussing, and testing at a small scale to understand their impacts. We should absolutely be doing that.

• CNBC, Bill Gates: Job-Stealing Robots Should Pay Income Taxes
• Daily Mail, Bill Gates Calls for 'Robot Tax' on Machines That Replace Human Labor in a Bid to Slow Down Automation
• Esquire, Bill Gates' Two Words to Protect Our Future: Tax Robots
• Fiscal Times, Bill Gates Wants to Tax the Robots That Are Stealing Our Jobs
• Forbes, The Error In Bill Gates' Latest Odd Idea - Let's Tax The Robots Stealing Our Jobs
• Forbes, 'Tax The Robots' Says Bill Gates
• Fortune, Bill Gates Says Robots Should Be Taxed Like Workers
• Fox News, Robots That Steal Human Jobs Should Pay Taxes, Gates Says
• Tech Times, Bots Stealing Human Jobs, Bill Gates Says 'Tax The Robots
• Vanity Fair, Bill Gates Has a Trumpian Plan to Make Job-Stealing Robots Pay (Taxes, That Is)
• Washington Examiner, Bill Gates Proposes 'Some Type of Robot Tax'

(Hat Tip: Nick Lum, Lewis Saret.)