Bill Gates backs taxes for robots taking over human jobs

Robots have at least one unfair advantage over human workers: they do not pay income tax.

Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder and the world's richest man, thinks that should change. Until now, the idea has been associated more with European socialists than tech leaders, and puts him in the unusual position of explicitly arguing for taxes to slow the adoption of new technology.

Mr Gates made his fortune from the spread of PCs, which helped to erase whole categories of worker, from typists to travel agents. But, in an interview with Quartz website, he said it may be time to deliberately slow the advance of job-killing technologies.

“It is really bad if people overall have more fear about what innovation is going to do than they have enthusiasm. That means they won’t shape it for the positive things it can do. And, you know, taxation is certainly a better way to handle it than just banning some elements of it.”

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The idea of using taxes to support people put out of work by automation has been catching on in the tech world. But Mr Gates went further, pushing for a direct levy on robots that would match what human workers pay. “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.”

The Financial Times Limited