Bill Gates raises ‘Tax the robots’ slogan again
Bill Gates has again called for a tax on robots, nine years after he first made the case in 2017. Bill Gates first called for robot taxes in 2017, in an interview with Kevin Delaney, who was then the CEO of Quartz. Nearly 10 years later, the idea is still on his mind.
In an interview with Ezra Klein of The New York Times that aired last week, the Microsoft founder said “society gets to decide” how to support its workers, even if AI is pushing them out. He said any unit of labor should attract the same payroll tax, whether a human or a robot does the work. During the interview, Bill Gates said this would give citizens a monetary safety net and keep tax revenue flowing to the government. Bill Gates said work should be measured in units of labor, no matter who delivers it. “You define a unit of labor and say, independent of whether that’s delivered by a human or robot, you are paying the same FICA tax that a human worker would pay,” Gates said.
Notably, Bill Gates is not alone in saying the AI boom needs a new approach to taxation. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for stronger tax policies, possibly aimed at AI companies, to spread the gains of the technology more widely. Similarly, OpenAI has proposed taxes tied to automated labor as part of a wider plan to deal with AI-driven disruption.