Bill Gates revives the robot tax: make machines that replace workers pay income tax
LudovicCreator · x · 2026-09-20
Bill Gates renews his explosive proposal: if a robot or AI does your job, it should pay taxes like you. Proposals include a robot tax sized to the fired employee's would-be contributions, a tax on AI token usage, and human-reserved jobs (childcare, eldercare, justice, delivering medical diagnoses) — funding retraining and social protection as automation erodes labor tax revenue. In Europe it remains debate-only: the EU backed off in 2017 under industry pressure, no such tax exists, and economists including Summers call it taxing productivity, questioning what even counts as a robot in the AI era.
Related event: Bill Gates Revives Robot Tax Proposal for the AI Era(2 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- EA and rationalists still flawed at being honest with themselves, argues commenter — NathanpmYoung · 2026-09-21
- Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman warns autonomous AI could become a 'silicon species' competing with humans — Olivier__OG · 2026-09-21
- Stanford professor: papers are dead as a measure of productivity as top-venue odds go random — anshulkundaje · 2026-09-21
- Jack Clark calls "stochastic parrot" a cognitive virus; Casado says it destroyed middle-ground arguments — inductionheads · 2026-09-21
- Schmidhuber: deep learning started as cybernetics — an 8-layer net modeled the UK economy in 1971 — SchmidhuberAI · 2026-09-20
- The Einstein test: Nature asks if AI can rediscover general relativity on its own — mikeflache · 2026-09-20