Bill Gates wants a tax on robots and AI tokens
Key Points
- Gates wants AI tokens and robots taxed to fund retraining and the safety net
- Employers pay payroll tax on staff but write robots off as an expense
- The levy would be targeted to protect cheaper medicine and education
- Gates first floated a robot tax years ago and still backs the idea
- Money raised should reach displaced workers and the communities hit hardest
Bill Gates has called on governments to tax AI tokens and robots to fund retraining and a stronger safety net for displaced workers.
“I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots,” said Bill Gates, Co-Founder of Microsoft and chairman of the Gates Foundation. He set out the proposal in an essay published on his personal blog, Gates Notes, on Wednesday (26 August).
Gates said the current tax system actively pushes employers towards machines and away from people. An employer who hires a worker pays payroll taxes on that worker’s earnings, while an employer who buys a robot can usually write the purchase off immediately as a business expense.
That imbalance matters far more as work disappears, because displaced workers pay less income tax at precisely the moment demand for state support starts to climb.
A levy on tokens and robots would slow the rush away from human labour slightly and raise money for retraining, according to Gates.
He said the tax would need careful targeting so that it does not hold back the purely beneficial uses of AI, such as making medicine and education cheaper for everyone.
Gates acknowledged the objection that such a tax is not optimally efficient in economic terms, and said critics who make that argument overlook the broader value of work to individuals and to society. The accelerated innovation that AI delivers will make a degree of inefficiency affordable, he said.
Gates first proposed a robot tax several years ago, when most of the reaction treated the idea as a strange one. He remains a firm proponent of the policy and described it as part of a wise response rather than a complete solution to the threat.
He said any money raised has to reach the people hit hardest by the transition, including workers who lose their jobs to AI and robots, those whose hours or wages decline, and communities where the losses are concentrated.
The tax is one of three ideas that Gates put forward in the essay. The others are a new domestic and international framework for managing the transition, and a category of work he calls Human Reserved that would be set aside for people alone.
