Bill Gates: robots should pay taxes when people loose jobs

The impact of automation on jobs and society is an increasingly hot topic, with debates going on about how and when human workers will be displaced by robots and A.I. systems.

Bill Gates said in a recent interview with Quartz that governments should tax companies’ use of automation technologies, to mitigate the impact of job losses. “Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things,” Gates said. “If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”

Gates’s idea is that robot taxes can be put towards things like education, elder care, and other societal needs. But government, not businesses, would need to make that happen, he said. "You cross the threshold of job-replacement of certain activities all sort of at once. So, you know, warehouse work, driving, room cleanup, there's quite a few things that are meaningful job categories that, certainly in the next 20 years, being thoughtful about that extra supply is a net benefit. It's important to have the policies to go with that," Gates said.

One potential option could be deploying a tax for the installation and operation of machines, but given the conversation is just getting started, Gates says there are numerous possibilities on the table.

“There are many ways to take that extra productivity and generate more taxes. Exactly how you’d do it, measure it, you know, it’s interesting for people to start talking about now.”

“People should be figuring it out. It is really bad if people overall have more fear about what innovation is going to do than they have enthusiasm. That means they won’t shape it for the positive things it can do,” Gates said.

Gates' idea for a robot tax comes as some consider whether a universal basic income may be necessary in future, although questions remain about how to fund such a policy. Gates isn’t alone here. EU lawmakers recently considered a similar proposal to tax robot owners to fund training for new jobs, but on February 16 the proposal failed to pass. 

Elon Musk reckons there'll be few other options than to implement government-paid wages in response to the automation of work. Finland is currently running a basic income trial that guarantees €560 ($595) a month to 2,000 unemployed people for two years.

According to the Financial Times, Benoît Hamon, France’s socialist candidate in this year’s presidential elections, has called for the robot tax to fund a minimum income for all.