Bill Gates has written a loooong essay on AI covering all sorts of things from potential benefits to immediate concerns. Feel free to read the whole thing if you’d like, we’re just going to highlight the section in which he makes the case for taxing tokens and robots:
Rebalance how we tax labor and capital.
As workers are pushed into different jobs, they will need retraining and other support from the social safety net. But they will be working less, which means they will be paying less in income taxes, and government revenues will drop just when the demand for those services is greatest. The funds will have to come from somewhere at a time when budgets are stretched.
I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots. Right now, if you’re an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings. But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense. The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines.
A tax would slow the rush away from human labor a little and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net. It would need to be targeted so it does not slow down the purely beneficial uses of AI, like making medicine and education cheaper.
Critics of this idea point out that it’s not optimally efficient in an economic sense, but they’re not considering the broader value of work for individuals and society. And with all the accelerated innovation we will have, we’ll be able to afford a little inefficiency as the price for keeping people employed.
I proposed a robot tax years ago and most of the reaction was that it was a strange idea. I’m still a big proponent of it. Although it is not the whole solution to the threat of AI, it is part of a wise response.
However we raise money for more assistance, it needs to reach the people who need it most, including workers who lose their jobs to AI and robots, people whose hours or wages decline, and communities where the losses are concentrated. We need to start doing that work now so that the systems are ready when the need becomes acute.
As Bill mentioned in his essay, this isn’t a new idea of his. It’s been almost ten years since he said in an interview with Quartz that he thinks robots should be taxed like the humans they replace and just as long since The International Federation of Robotics said they think that idea is dumb. “Bill Gates’ latest idea to tax robots aims to solve a problem that does not exist: empirical analysis of economic data and forecasts shows that automation and the use of robots create new jobs by increasing productivity,” said IFR in 2017.
Robots and tokens tax, yay or nay?
