Bill Gates Wants to Tax Robots

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nccryZOcrUg

by nshelly • 9 years ago

71 72 9 years ago

frik2• 9 years ago

He wanted a pay-to-view internet super-highway too. Only the consumers decided and favored the open WWW instead of his The Microsoft Network (as can be found preinstalled in Win95) - He had to rewrite his The Road Ahead 1995 book after 6 months, as WWW won. (first edition is hardcover, second edition is paperback)

dopeboy• 9 years ago

That piqued my curiosity - didn't know that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Dial-up

xellisx3• 9 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3DudqwsRPw

frik2• 9 years ago

Video of The Microsoft Network - 1995 advertisement video with young Jennifer Aniston actress:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGYcNcFhctc&t=17m44s

phs318u• 9 years ago

Yes. MSN was intended to compete with Compuserve. Neither could compete with the www.

_dirtyjimmy_• 9 years ago

good idea

kevinnk2• 9 years ago

Bill Gates is a super smart guy, so I'll assume there's an argument I've missed, but how does this make any sense? If automating factory jobs "frees up labor" (as he says) to become teachers and healthcare workers, wouldn't the income tax from the new teachers and healthcare workers just replace the lost tax from the factory workers?

Gustomaximus• 9 years ago

Teachers and healthcare works need to be paid in the first place. How would this be funded?

kevinnk2• 9 years ago

Teachers still pay income tax. It may be true that the amount of money the government pays out increased, but the amount of income tax didn't go down.

Regardless, I took his argument to be about a more general shift to service work rather than about teachers specificlly.

chongli• 9 years ago

By a land value tax. Taxing robots is a bad idea. Who decides how big, how small, how productive or how inefficient a robot should be? Pretty much any robot tax you can think of will skew the robot market and the distortions could be very bad for productivity. Land value taxes are nice and out of the way. They don't tell people how to run their lives. They merely tax people on an egregious form of unearned wealth.

Rapzid• 9 years ago

Have you seen how much teachers get paid? Anyway, much of teacher's salaries come from taxes..

How will healthcare workers get paid when nobody has a job? That's a bit hyperbolic, but he is arguing against the consolidation of wealth from automation starving our ability to fund social services as even current levels.

beisner• 9 years ago

I think he is saying that in order to pay the salaries for those new jobs, taxing robots as if they were employees might be fruitful. As in, there's not enough economic demand for those roles at the moment, and in a future where there is a true surplus of human labor due to automation, it might make sense to design a tax scheme that mitigates the issue of wealth concentration in robot owners.

xt00• 9 years ago

By the same logic the person who was put out of work by a piece of software made by Microsoft should result in the company using the Microsoft product to create value should be taxed as well. Right? So his statement that robot companies should not be concerned is pretty disingenuous if you ask me. Of course they will be concerned along with the companies. We should be coming up with incentives to give people jobs rather than negative reasons to stop them from disappearing. Like would many companies hire more people if the government paid them a subsidy to hire more people? Probably they would. Those same people pay income tax so it middles out or something.. :)

nshelly• 9 years ago

I think Gates meant this more as a thought experiment, since he can't seriously think we can define a "robot." We need to find ways to cope with the speed of automation, by finding more revenue for putting displaced people back to work. How can we get the labor participation rate (62% and dropping) back to the pre-recession levels, as we fight both aging and automation.

toomuchtodo• 9 years ago

How can we get the labor participation rate (62% and dropping) back to the pre-recession levels, as we fight both aging and automation.

You don't? You use automation to deliver consumer excess so people don't have to work anymore. The problem is not the automation and job loss; its who is capturing the benefits (ie corporations and shareholders).

Slavery is wrong (communism). Not allowing the patenting or copyright of automation or algorithms is just fine (socialism).

Note: In my scenario, I'm not taking your ability to operate you own automation or code away; I'm simply removing artificial government restrictions on its use and distribution. What the patent and copyright office giveth, they taketh away.

Also, creators are going to create even if they're not permitted to reap outsized rewards from their creations.

EDIT: Since HN throttling has kicked in and I can't reply directly:

Limiting the returns means limiting the risks people are willing to take.

@skookumchuck: If your basic needs are met, what risks are you taking? How is it different than founders who come from rich families so a startup has no risk?

The more people we can meet the basic needs of (again, with automation), the more people who can take "shoot the moon" risks safely.

awqrre• 9 years ago

maybe thats why he had these odd chuckles at the end... he cant be serious.

zxcvvcxz• 9 years ago

Seriously?

We all know who Bill Gates is, but let's just examine this proposition as if someone else said it, maybe someone anonymous or who lacks prestige.

We would tell them that sewing machine aren't taxed; farm equipment isn't taxed; street sweepers aren't taxed. We would tell them that productivity through technological innovation is an essential ingredient to our economy and that human needs are ever-evolving, and new jobs will be created just like they always have been.

I am reminded of a story that a businessman told me a few years ago. While touring China, he came upon a team of nearly 100 workers building an earthen dam with shovels. The businessman commented to a local official that, with an earth-moving machine, a single worker could create the dam in an afternoon. The official’s curious response was, “Yes, but think of all the unemployment that would create.” “Oh,” said the businessman, “I thought you were building a dam. If it’s jobs you want to create, then take away their shovels and give them spoons!”

onion2k2• 9 years ago

new jobs will be created just like they always have been

I think that hypothesis is what Bill Gates is questioning. The rate of change is far quicker than anything we've seen before, so using historical examples of how jobs have been created when technology puts people out of work as evidence of what will happen is grossly flawed. There's a possibility that we won't invent new jobs in time. We should think about what that means.

witty_username14• 9 years ago

If there's no way to invent jobs then we've reached an utopia where robots do everything.

mnsc4• 9 years ago

We should think about what that means

Free market economy doesn't think ahead, that's both it's strength and weakness. Government tries to think ahead. A taxation on robots might be a way to ease the road to the future _if_ the market doesn't invent jobs in the rate robots/automation in general takes them away. If you are a person with faith in the market the argument is easy, it's non-marketist to think ahead and the market will invent jobs because supply/demand.

My take on this that for the market to be able to invent those jobs the economy has to become virtual. So the solution from the Government should be heavy subsidies to VR equipment, give the extremely poor extremely powerful gaming rigs and install tubes with free food(ish) to everyone. Then the market will survive, matrix style.

Oletros• 9 years ago

and new jobs will be created just like they always have been.

I highly doubt that new jobs will be created when the trend is to automate them.

And we still have the problem with the people unemployed by the automation, what we should do for them?

walterstucco2• 9 years ago

and we'll soon have the problem of automation replacing people who automate jobs.

LoudTechie• 9 years ago

How come a robot pay taxes? It will be paid by the creators or the owner of that robot Which means that owner/creator will pay double taxes. Including his own and his robot's taxes.

gnaritas6• 9 years ago

That's exactly the point, those taxes will help cover all the people now unemployed by those robots.

witty_username14• 9 years ago

Should the same have been done when calculators made human calculators unemployed?

martalist• 9 years ago

First question, how do you define a robot?

GoToRO• 9 years ago

Somebody who works in a corporation... :)

paulsutter• 9 years ago

Middle managers wont get replaced by robots that prepare powerpoints and know how to compliment their boss. They'll be replaced by algorithms that eliminate any need for their role. Is a 3d printer a robot?

Normally I'm impressed by Bill Gates' thinking, but this seems half-baked.

ak4g• 9 years ago

Normally I'm impressed by Bill Gates' thinking, but this seems half-baked.

I would submit that that has more to do with the summarizing/simplifying/editing done by Quartz to represent Gates' views on the topic in 1:43.

WheelsAtLarge• 9 years ago

This is a very smart idea. Taxes' primary function is to finance what can only be provided by government in our society. With the advent of robots as a major part of our working force taxing them is a way to get money for the public good. Why shouldn't they be taxed? The alternative is for the robots and their owners to get a free ride while still using society's infrastructure. Taxing robots is probably not enough. I suspect in time we'll need to find a tax, or an equivalent, for algorithms too.

witty_username14• 9 years ago

By that logic, we should tax cars, computers, calculators.

The owners already pay taxes though. Why should they pay additional tax for using robots?

xellisx3• 9 years ago

The owner pay taxes for all sorts of things, but the companies used robots to cut out human interaction, which means lower money paid out for those workers. Of course laws let the companies "export" the jobs to other countries for lower wages since the 70's.

dwaltrip2• 9 years ago

Because it's a new paradigm of value creation that has broad ramifications across all of society, so the tax structure should reflect that.

Tax policy shouldn't be static, it should keep pace with the society and culture it serves as they change over time.

namlem• 9 years ago

Why do we need a new tax just for this though. We should just raise capital gains tax and make it progressive.

LinuxFreedom• 9 years ago

A very interesting book to to gain a clear understanding: "Killing the Host" by Michael Hudson

http://michael-hudson.com/2015/09/killing-the-host-the-book/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH8FWrbzxEs

Almost everything Mr. Gatez does is wrong and became a big problem for humanity - Windows, his investments in GMOs and atomic power and US pharma companies that are blackmailing poor countries - with this piece the most important thing he does: justify tax on work as something good. Sure, a few percent of taxes are used for public wealth (good thing!), but the biggest part nowadays is extracted and transformed into profits for rich individuals and companies.

As democratic control of how taxes are used seems to be of no interest for the public, the system that was built for more participation is transformed into a profit-extracting machine for international criminal organizations.

But maybe the robot tax idea can trigger a general discussion about what should be taxed and what not. Please add the book by Mr. Hudson to these discussions.

BrailleHunting• 9 years ago

To capture more corporate wealth, also raise corporate taxes to previous levels when unions functioned and the middle-class flourished. Doing so would capture more gains which can pay for vital social services like healthcare, food security and generally provide for less than obscenely-brutal poverty.

noplay• 9 years ago

Interesting Benoît Hamon a french candidate to presidential propose the same idea. The definition of robot is not clear for the moment.

majewsky3• 9 years ago

The definition of "robot" is the hard part here. Just this week I saw a newspaper article arguing that we could tackle automation by giving one of the robots in an automated factory to each of the displaced workers, so that they would each own a robot and earn the robot's income. I just sat there and chuckled because obviously the author thinks of robots stricly in terms of movie characters like C3PO.

Is Siri a robot? Or is Siri thousands of robots working in concert to create the illusion of a single agent?

whazor• 9 years ago

A green party here in Netherlands promotes to remove income taxes and only tax the raw materials extracted from earth and coming from the border.

jdhopeunique• 9 years ago

These robots and AI replacing humans stories are just a distraction to take focus off of immigration. AI is a convenient scapegoat to take attention off an issue that is potentially more politically disruptive to tech companies interests.

Bill Gates Wants to Tax Robots

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