I was standing at the self check-out at the grocery store the other day thinking about an article I read a couple of years back.
It featured a short video and transcript of Bill Gates making the case for taxing the robots.
I noticed four check-out stations staffed by a single employee. On a busy afternoon in the past, those four stations would need at least four dedicated people and up to four more people diverted from the produce or grocery departments to bag the items, to operate.
Automation has impacted up to (or at least) three jobs at that grocery store and the market is trending toward losing more jobs, as I highlighted in a blog post earlier this summer.
As an aside, with nearly 600 posts published on a variety of topics they are all beginning to blur together. I got to that last paragraph and thought, hold on, I’ve already written about this. Almost.
Anyhow, back at it. Gates makes an important contribution to the discussion, not only as the disruptor investing in artificial intelligence and automation but also in offering a potential solution. As I point out at the very end of my previous post, disruption to the workforce will impact the revenue collected by income tax and more people will be competing for fewer of those traditionally available jobs.
Some of those displaced people will be employed by new, yet-to-be created industries as happened during the mechanization process of the industrial revolution. Others will need to transition to other work and so it will ripple through the marketplace.
The robots: From mechanization to automation
There is a social and economic cost to automation and, as I have heard time and again by folks in a variety of fields, there is a shortage of workers in many jobs that serve our seniors and youth. In many instances, these industries feature incredibly low wages. As Gates points out, taxing the robots is a way to generate the revenue to increase re-training opportunities and wages for student support staff, early childhood educators and home care workers serving our elders, just to name a few.
It is interesting that Gates does not expect business to solve the issues they are creating by automating. Instead, he says, “the inequity-solving part, absolutely government’s got a big role to play there.”
Gates raised this point more than two years ago. The sooner the provincial government takes control of their responsibility to the public interest and heeds his advice addressing the situation, the better. It will help businesses make informed decisions about if, how and when they will automate certain jobs and it has the potential to generate revenue to improve services balancing the growing inequality in our economy and society.
Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay
The issue of transition from “old economy” jobs to new ones is huge and as diverse as the jobs themselves. How do we increase incomes for the caregiver workers. Is it primarily government’s responsibility? My sense is that the Scandinavian countries have a lot to teach us.
I agree 100% less taxing robots!
The CPP, EI and other social programs are also losing their revenue base due to automation.
I’ve been writing to my politicians about this for years, and I know it seems like a scary thing for them to do. However, the business people I know and respect are saying there is a immense wealth that can easily be shared by the companies and people that are profiting from automation, and that it won’t hurt them. They won’t feel the pinch, even with a tiny tax..
Another thing I have written to my politicians about before is taxing automated stock trades. Some countries tax every single trade. What that means is these artificial intelligence systems and algorithms cannot do millisecond multiple trades that manipulate our market, sometimes grossly. If every trade had a tax on it, what would happen?
I have also written to my politicians about pay for performance and politics. Hope you will reflect on that and perhaps blog about it.
Economists and technical leaders, including Bill Gates, have been saying this, too – Tax the robots. How would that look exactly? How would it be implemented?
Is the sale of a robot is a taxable transaction – yes probably a retail tax is applied.
How do you put ‘income tax’ onto a robot?
Without making machines into entities (a concept I abhor) with rights and privileges as a ‘being’, how can we create an ‘income’ on it?
One of the solutions to worker displacement discussed is Universal Income.
That’s do-able, right?
I read recently that in the next few decade, Canada’s population will double or triple to 70 0100 million, mainly through immigration.. We are failing to provide the essentials of life already, on a per capita basis, and we have an income crisis (not a housing crisis, truly it is an income shortage), so even if mass population growth offers benefits such as economies of scale or a bigger tax base, how can we possibly manage such a huge population, esp. with more and more jobs being automated out of existence?
References:
https://qz.com/911968/bill-gates-the-robot-that-takes-your-job-should-pay-taxes/
https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-robots-pay-taxes-2017-2?op=1