Robots should pay taxes, if they takeover human jobs – Bill Gates

As fast as robots are taking place of humans in the industry to do their work, people are loosing their jobs. As result, those people won’t pay taxes, nor would the robots who just took over their jobs. Who will then pay for the difference?

Governments use our taxes to fund the development and infrastructure around us. Education system, health care, roads construction etc. all are dependent on our taxes. No tax, means no development. That problem wasn’t really noticed before until Bill Gates delivered his idea.

Simply — have the robots, who steal human jobs, pay taxes in place of those who loses the job — that’s the idea, former CEO Microsoft has to tell.

According to Gates, once robots or the things that we know as automation take over the jobs and all the activities humans would do and free up labor and they can “do a better job of reaching out to the elderly, having smaller class sizes, helping kids with special needs,” Gates says. “You know, all of those are things where human empathy and understanding are still very, very unique. And we still deal with an immense shortage of people to help out there.”

“But you can’t just give up that income tax, because that’s part of how you’ve been funding that level of human workers.” — Gates told Quartz.

How a robot would pay taxes?

Well, if you just started thinking how the heck a robot will pay anything then you should take it just as a term that Bill used to have a real impact on us to hear it very closely. Companies who will be saving on these robots could pay the taxes because they don’t have to pay or support humans. Or otherwise the companies making those robots and selling over could pay it.

“Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, Social Security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.” — Bill Gates suggested in an interview.

McKinsey report, earlier last year, suggested that 50% of the jobs that humans do today could be replaced by robots.