The robot that takes your job should pay taxes, says Bill Gates

[Frank Cannon]

https://qz.com/911968/bill-gates-the-robot-that-takes-your-job-should-pay-taxes/

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.

You can watch Gates’ remarks in the video above. Below is a transcript, lightly edited for style and clarity.

Quartz: What do you think of a robot tax? This is the idea that in order to generate funds for training of workers, in areas such as manufacturing, who are displaced by automation, one concrete thing that governments could do is tax the installation of a robot in a factory, for example.

Bill Gates: Certainly there will be taxes that relate to automation. 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. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.

And what the world wants is to take this opportunity to make all the goods and services we have today, and free up labor, let us do a better job of reaching out to the elderly, having smaller class sizes, helping kids with special needs. You know, all of those are things where human empathy and understanding are still very, very unique. And we still deal with an immense shortage of people to help out there.

So if you can take the labor that used to do the thing automation replaces, and financially and training-wise and fulfillment-wise have that person go off and do these other things, then you’re net ahead. But you can’t just give up that income tax, because that’s part of how you’ve been funding that level of human workers.

[Frank Cannon]

How many secretaries lost their jobs to Microsoft run computers?

[geronl]

He's finally reached the age of senility

[guitar4jesus]

He's finally reached the age of senility

Aye.

[Fishrrman]

I'll disagree with the replies above.
I think Mr. Gates makes a good point.

It's becoming obvious that in the coming decades, more and more low-to-midrange IQ workers (such as yours truly) are going to lose jobs as an increasing number of menial-to-midrange job tasks become automated.

There'll be literally "nothing for them to do" any more. At the very least, the competition for those jobs that remain will be fierce, with many shut out of the game altogether.

As a result, we'll see the emergence of what will become, for all intents, an "unemployable class". Not because they can't work (at their appropriate level of employment) -- but because that "level of employment" will have largely vanished, having become robotized.

And it follows that many of them (most?) will end up on the dole, from cradle to grave.
The money to support this dole has to come from somewhere.

The workers once paid the taxes that kept the system going (for better or worse).

The revenue has to come from somewhere.

Having said that, it will probably STILL be cheaper for employers to use robot "employees" instead of human workers.

To those who think this is nonsense, what alternatives do you suggest?
Should we offer the hamburger-flippers courses in programming?

Perhaps the only realistic scenario will be to do everything possible to discourage the low-midrange cohort of the population from reproducing themselves...

[Cripplecreek]

Companies already pay taxes on equipment year after year after year. All a robot is is corporate property and they are already taxes on it. One of the good things Rick Snyder managed to push through here in Michigan was the elimination of business property taxes for at least white collar business.

Cause and effect people, tax a company even more and someone will slip a memory card into the robot and it will accept Chinese characters input by a Chinese technician

[GtHawk]

Too funny! I posted this days ago on another robot thread, who knew?

I expect unions to demand that all robots be paid a comparable wage to the human analog and required to join the appropriate union and pay dues, the fed and state governments will support the demand because they will be be able to collect taxes on the robots wages. Instead of health care it will be required that the robots be awarded a maintenance and repair policy, plus paid refurbishment time not less than the paid vacation time of the human analog.

[geronl]

Too funny! I posted this days ago on another robot thread, who knew?

I expect unions to demand that all robots be paid a comparable wage to the human analog and required to join the appropriate union and pay dues, the fed and state governments will support the demand because they will be be able to collect taxes on the robots wages. Instead of health care it will be required that the robots be awarded a maintenance and repair policy, plus paid refurbishment time not less than the paid vacation time of the human analog.

prescient

[guitar4jesus]

@GtHawk

That's the way I was interpreting it.

[Oceander]

Gates is a f-cking idiot.  There is no loss of tax base because the company was allowed a full deduction for the wages paid.  No wages paid means no deduction, means the business is taxed on the income. 

[thackney]

It's becoming obvious that in the coming decades, more and more low-to-midrange IQ workers (such as yours truly) are going to lose jobs as an increasing number of menial-to-midrange job tasks become automated.

There'll be literally "nothing for them to do" any more. At the very least, the competition for those jobs that remain will be fierce, with many shut out of the game altogether.

How many decades of automation have to show this fear to be a false claim before it stops being brought up?  For more than 100 years this type of claim has been proven false. 

It just seems silly to imagine the technology moves forward and the society doesn't.  Take the job you do now, and try to predict its function and output from 50 years ago.

[Weird Tolkienish Figure]

By this same logic we need to ban shell scripts and batch files.

[Cripplecreek]

How many decades of automation have to show this fear to be a false claim before it stops being brought up?  For more than 100 years this type of claim has been proven false. 

It just seems silly to imagine the technology moves forward and the society doesn't.  Take the job you do now, and try to predict its function and output from 50 years ago.

We humans are pretty adaptable and that adaptability includes both adaptation of technology and to technology.

My great great grandfather began his life pre civil war in eastern Europe knowing only horse drawn wagons. A couple years before he died at 103 years old he was invited to the cockpit of a DC-3 and fly it for 20 minutes or so.  In the years between he saw the arrival of the automobile and airplane, electric lights and radio. He put his horse and oxen teams and farm equipment out to pasture and bought a tractor and a truck etc. If he had lived another dozen years he would have watched Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon on TV.

The technological advances I've adapted to since my birth in 1964 are probably on a similar par. If you had handed me a Galaxy 7 cell phone when I graduated in 83 I wouldn't have had the slightest clue what it was. Phones in those days were mounted on the wall of homes or in the cars of the wealthiest Americans.