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posted by on Sunday February 19 2017, @05:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the robots-are-not-covered-by-the-sixteenth-amendment dept.

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @12:58AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @12:58AM (#469121)

    Eventually there will likely come a point where AI becomes good enough to replace nearly all jobs, including fixing other robots. It's wildly unrealistic to expect that everyone work in 'creative' jobs, and even if they tried, there would not be enough money in it. The amount of jobs created by automation is unlikely to be higher than the amount of jobs lost to automation.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @08:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @08:02AM (#469202)

    It's simple. We go Eldar route.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 20 2017, @09:37AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 20 2017, @09:37AM (#469222) Journal

    Eventually there will likely come a point where AI becomes good enough to replace nearly all jobs, including fixing other robots.

    Still doesn't mean that it'll replace nearly all jobs. You still have the matters of price, the usual economic factors like comparative advantage and Jevons paradox, and the fact that ostracized elements of the economy aren't just going to stop working just because they can't get jobs in the primary economy.

    I think the first two points have been made before. The last one perhaps not so much. In the US, for a good example, a large portion of the poorest US citizens have been shut out completely of the primary economy. Their labor simply is not worth minimum wage for various reasons. While some of them might indeed just not work at all, most participate in the gray/black markets of the US. For example, gangs are a significant employer [cnn.com] in the US (link states 1.4 million members in gangs in 2011, some research [sciencedaily.com] indicates the FBI was heavily undercounting gang membership in the US). Point is that the US has for some time already economically ostracized a fair portion of its population just like the AI revolution supposedly will do some point in the future. They didn't merely stop working and starve as a result.