Abstract:
Facing the employment crisis that artificial intelligence may cause, Bill Gates proposed a plan to ensure that humans can continue to receive income: tax robots. The billionaire and philanthropist said in a talk show broadcast on Tuesday local time that even if artificial intelligence causes workers to lose their jobs, it should still be "society's decision" to provide protection for these workers.
“You can define a ‘unit of labor’ and stipulate that — whether the work is done by a human or a robot — it must pay the same FICA tax as a human worker,” Gates said.
FICA tax refers to the payroll tax in the United States. The way it works is that workers use part of their wages to pay for benefits such as Social Security and Medicare, while employers are required to pay an equal amount of matching funds. Gates said taxing robots that replace human jobs would both provide economic security for citizens and ensure continued tax revenue for the government.
“Just because economic signals show it’s cheaper to use AI, doesn’t mean society has to,” he said.
Bill Gates has previously warned that artificial intelligence and robotics will have a serious impact on white-collar jobs. In a nearly 6,000-word article published in August, he noted that office work had been affected "to some degree" and speculated that blue-collar jobs would soon face the same impact.
Although Gates noted that the development of physical robots lags behind artificial intelligence systems, he believes that people underestimate how quickly humanoid robots can catch up.
Gates also mentioned in the article that taxing artificial intelligence "tokens" (AI tokens) "will slightly slow down the pace of companies abandoning human labor and raise funds for employee retraining and building a stronger social safety net."
Gates first proposed the concept of a "robot tax" in an interview in 2017. Nearly ten years later, this idea still haunts him.
“I still strongly support this proposition,” Gates wrote in the article. “While it does not completely solve the threats posed by artificial intelligence, it is part of a smart response.”
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