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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
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(Score: 1) by moondoctor on Monday February 20 2017, @05:36PM
Bingo. And all those cost/benefit relationships are getting bigger at breakneck pace. The meat robots are just expensive and getting in the way at this point. Couple the throwaway mindset with modular design (i.e. unafraid to just replace entire assembly that has one small failure) and robots can be fixing themselves pretty soon. (That said, my heart does beat a little faster every time a tricky job runs on the big CNC as I pray it doesn't eat the material or itself. It doesn't even notice when it's snapped a tool and is ramming the head into the work.)
As a fan of old school machinery (wrenching on carburetor cars, etc.) it's sad, but the potential benefit for society/progress as a species is phenomenal. It's all about how we manage the transition. It's not going so well so far for the lower segments of society.