Bill Gates has a plan to ensure that humans keep getting paid in an AI jobs apocalypse: Tax the robots.
In an interview with Ezra Klein of The New York Times that aired on Tuesday, the billionaire philanthropist said that “society gets to decide” how to support its workers — even if AI is pushing them out.
“You define a unit of labor and say, independent of whether that’s delivered by a human or robot, you are paying the same FICA tax that a human worker would pay,” Gates said, referring to the US payroll tax.
FICA taxes work by having workers pay portions of their paychecks toward benefits like Social Security and Medicare, with employers matching the workers’ contributions. Taxing robots that take human jobs would ensure both a monetary safety net for citizens and continued tax revenue for the government, Gates said.
“Just because the economic signals say that it’d be lower cost to use an AI doesn’t mean society has to do that,” he said.
Gates, who cofounded Microsoft in 1975, has previously warned that AI and robotics are poised to lay waste to white-collar jobs. In a nearly 6,000-word essay he published in August, he said office jobs are already being hit “modestly,” and speculated that blue-collar jobs are soon to follow.
Though Gates said that physical robots are lagging behind AI systems in development, he said people underestimate how soon humanoid figures will catch up.
In the essay, Gates also said that taxing AI tokens “would slow the rush away from human labor a little and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net.”
Gates is not alone in arguing that the AI boom needs a new approach to taxation.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for more robust tax policies — potentially targeted at AI companies — to spread the technology’s gains more broadly, while OpenAI has proposed taxes tied to automated labor as part of a wider plan to respond to AI-driven disruption.
Gates first called for robot taxes in 2017 during an interview with Kevin Delaney, who was then the CEO of Quartz. Nearly 10 years later, the idea remains on his mind.
“I’m still a big proponent of it,” Gates wrote in his essay. “Although it is not the whole solution to the threat of AI, it is part of a wise response.”
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