Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and world's richest man, said in an interview Friday that robots that steal human jobs should pay their fair share of taxes.
"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," he 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 made the remark during an interview with Quartz. He said robot taxes could help fund projects like caring for the elderly or working with children in school. Quartz reported that European Union lawmakers considered a proposal to tax robots in the past. The law was rejected.
Recode, citing a McKinsey report, said that 50 percent of jobs performed by humans are vulnerable to robots, which could result in the loss of about $2.7 trillion in the U.S. alone.
"Exactly how you'd do it, measure it, you know, it's interesting for people to start talking about now," Gates said. "Some of it can come on the profits that are generated by the labor-saving efficiency there. Some of it can come directly in some type of robot tax. I don't think the robot companies are going to be outraged that there might be a tax. It's OK."
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2017/02/18/robots-that-steal-human-jobs-should-pay-taxes-gates-says.html
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wumbler on Sunday February 19 2017, @06:29PM
The practicalities of this are going to be difficult. How do you determine what is a robot? How do you determine how many workers were replaced? How do you tell apart the effect of robots from the effect of general efficiency improvements in production processes? Auditors? This could cause endless squabble and arguments.
Maybe there can be a different approach:
1. Fix loopholes for avoidance of corporate tax (easy! /s)
2. Divide company profits by number of employees
3. Take the result of (2) as a multiplier of sorts to determine the corporate tax rate of the company
This would be quite a hit for companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, which make large profits with very few employees. But that might not be a bad thing. We probably also need a means to classify companies, so "manufacturing" companies would use a different scale than "information technology" companies, for example.