I think Bill Gates had a interesting ideal last week about people losing their jobs to Robots, and this means governments are getting less tax from workers and companies are making more profits because they haven't got to pay workers.
His ideal was a robot tax should be brought in.
Not sure how it will work, but with more robots doing workers jobs something like this may have to happen.
Bill Gates calls for income tax on robots
Microsoft co-founder suggests money should be used to retrain people replaced by robots
Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and the world’s richest man, thinks that should change. It is an idea that until now has been associated more with European socialists than tech industry 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 workers, from typists to travel agents. But, speaking in an interview with Quartz, he argued that it may be time to deliberately slow the advance of the next job-killing technologies.
“It is really bad if people overall have more fear about what innovation is going to do than they have enthusiasm,” he said. “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.”
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 extra money should be used to retrain people the robots have replaced, Mr Gates said, with “communities where this has a particularly big impact” first in line for support.
Some politicans have also joined the fray. Benoît Hamon, France’s Socialist candidate in this year’s presidential elections, has called for a tax on robots to fund a minimum income for all.
Some tech leaders have hinted that the tech companies’ customers — rather than the industry itself — should foot a higher tax bill. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s current chief executive, said: “Whenever somebody cuts cost, that means, hopefully, a surplus is getting created. You can always tax surplus.”
Mr Gates echoed that suggestion, though he also struck a more radical stance with his levy on the machines’ producers. “I don’t think the robot companies are going to be outraged that there might be a tax,” he said. “It’s OK.”
https://www.ft.com/content/d04a89c2-f6c8-11e6-9516-2d969e0d3b65