Bill Gates: Companies That Replace Human Workers With Robots Should Pay Tax Too

October 1 (IT Home) — According to a report today (the 1st) by Business Insider, Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates believes that if AI replaces human work on a large scale, robots could be taxed so that people who lose their jobs still have income security. Even if AI pushes people out of the job market, society still has “the right to decide” how to protect workers. “You could first define a unit of labour: whether that labour is done by a person or by a robot, it should pay the same federal insurance contributions tax as a human worker.”

In the United States, the federal insurance contributions tax is levied as a percentage of a worker’s wages to fund programmes such as Social Security and Medicare, and employers pay an equal amount. Gates argues that if robots take over human jobs, taxing robots in the same way would both provide people with economic security and maintain the government’s source of tax revenue.

Gates has warned repeatedly that AI and robotics could hit white-collar jobs hard. In a long article published in August this year, he wrote that the impact on office jobs is still “mild,” and that blue-collar jobs may “soon” face the same problem.

Gates believes that physical robots currently lag behind AI systems in their pace of development, but that people underestimate how quickly humanoid robots could catch up. Taxing AI tokens could slow the replacement of human labour by AI slightly, while raising money for job retraining and a stronger social safety net.

As IT Home understands it, Gates first proposed a robot tax back in 2017, in an interview with then Quartz CEO Kevin Delaney. Nearly ten years on, the idea has not left his thinking. “I’m still very much in favour of it. A robot tax cannot completely solve the threat posed by AI, but it should be part of a sensible response.”