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EU Commissioner Says No to Bill Gates' Robot Tax Idea (fortune.com)

Posted by msmash on from the different-perspective dept.

Andrus Ansip, the European Commissioner in charge of the Digital Single Market, has said that he does not support Bill Gates' idea of taxing robots that replace human workers. From a report: Microsoft founder Gates made an argument for robots incurring taxes equivalent to that worker's income taxes during an interview in February. "Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed," 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." But Ansip has made it clear that he is not in favor of a robot tax. Speaking during a CNBC-hosted panel at the Pioneers tech conference in Vienna on Thursday, Ansip said the "aim of taxation is not just (to) collect revenues... but to increase salaries of teachers and police," CNBC reports. "No way. No way," he added, when asked if he would support the tax.

11 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. Bill Gates is correct on this issue by sinij · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Government relies on income and sales taxes to disproportionate degree. With robots taking over, there won't be enough money to support social programs or even local government. We will quickly get to unified world government, but it will be controlled by multinationals that own these robots.

  2. Eventually they will have to... by jawtheshark · · Score: 2
    ... or lose funds. No taxes, no government spending, no government spending, no way to keep all these unemployed people feeded.

    Perhaps he'll suggest that they just have to eat cake if there is no bread....

    I do understand why not: taxing robots, would keep industry and production out of Europe. Evidently, if robot work is taxed in the EU, the robots will be put in non-EU countries, including the few non-robot workers who still do pay taxes... Not good for the economy (well, until nobody can buy goods any more, of course).

    --
    Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
    1. Re:Eventually they will have to... by religionofpeas · · Score: 2

      No they won't have to. Instead of adding up all the different kinds of robots in a company, you can simply tax the whole company a fixed percentage of its sales.

      Taxing individual robots makes things very complicated.

    2. Re:Eventually they will have to... by jawtheshark · · Score: 2
      As a citizen of one of the countries that is "misused" for tax evasion, ehm, I mean "tax optimization", I can tell you that is going to get pretty ugly very quickly. After some documents came public, some large multinationals pay less taxes than me and my spouse together. They're going to continue to do that. It's in the nature of large corporations.

      While taxing robots might be difficult from an accounting perspective (Good! More accountant jobs... or accountant AI jobs), you can quantify robots and their production.

      --
      Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
    3. Re:Eventually they will have to... by religionofpeas · · Score: 2

      some large multinationals pay less taxes than me and my spouse together.

      Taxing robots won't fix that, though.

  3. Going to laugh myself silly by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm going to point at all you fools and laugh myself silly when robots don't take everyones' jobs.
    Even Chicken Little is going to point and laugh derisively, shaking his chicken-head sadly at how dumb humans can be.

    Some people just want to watch the world burn.
    Then there are some people who, for some inexplicable reason, just want to run around, waving their arms like madmen, doom-saying like there's no tomorrow.
    For some reason they seem to be the same people who obsessively correct peoples' grammar and spelling, and nitpick choice of one word over another in a sentence. Anyone got any ideas on why that is?

  4. Abandon income tax by Hentes · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Bill Gates is right that current tax systems incentivise companies to hire as few workers as possible. But I believe the solution is not a "robot tax", because it's not easy to define what a robot is, how much money it "makes", and automation may not even come in the form of robots. I think the best solution would be to abandon the income tax altogether, relying instead on corporate and sales taxation.

  5. Wookie defense by ezdiy · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I'm not an english speaker, can one tell me how:

    Aim of taxation is not just (to) collect revenues... but to increase salaries of teachers and police

    Is related to robot tax in *any* way? Does he mean since there will be robots, police and teachers etc will be no longer necessary, thus government expenses will be vastly lower and ensuing gap in income tax will be a non-issue? Or police and teachers will be robots too, so it all cancels out? I just have grave difficulty connecting "we need teachers" (?) and "this is why we must not tax robots" in logically coherent manner.

  6. Re:A little short-sighted by Richard_at_work · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They didn't tax Excel, VisiCalc or Lotus 1-2-3 even when they put entire floors of people out of jobs in accounting rooms in larger businesses...

    So why should they tax the "robots" being used to automate other jobs?

    Gates seemed to be fine when it was his product doing the automation, I don't see whats all that different about this situation.

  7. Google "Luddite" by rsilvergun · · Score: 2

    and at least read the Wikipedia page. There were decades of unemployment & social strife following the industrial revolution until two World Wars thinned the herd and tech caught up a bit. History is not on your side. We're already seeing massive underemployment due to productivity increases. The auto companies are laying folks off because they're making more cars than people can buy (e.g. too much inventory).

    When you see a smoldering pile of dried twigs during a drought you shouldn't just move along. Do something or the whole forest will burn.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
  8. Re:A little short-sighted by Dagger2 · · Score: 2

    Historically, we've replaced some jobs with automation and people have migrated to other jobs that the automation wasn't capable of. This time around, we're getting to the point where AI and robotics are good enough to replace anything a human can do. Automation will be able to do your job better than you can, and you can forget migrating to another job because the robots can do the other job just as well as you can too.

    That is fundamentally different from any of the last times this happened.