Robots that steal jobs must pay tax: Gates

Microsoft founder also warned that bio-terrorism could kill millions BILL GATES said a robot tax could finance jobs taking care of elderly people or working with kids in schools. HE argued that governments must oversee such programmes rather than relyin

Washington, Feb. 19: Robots that steal human jobs should pay taxes, Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates has said.

“Certainly there will be taxes that relate to automation. 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,” Mr Gates told Quartz website.

“If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level,” he said.

Mr Gates, one of the world’s richest men, believes that governments should tax companies’ use of robots, as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of automation and to fund other types of employment.

The 61-year-old philanthropist said a robot tax could finance jobs taking care of elderly people or working with kids in schools, for which needs are unmet and to which humans are particularly well suited. He argued that governments must oversee such programmes rather than relying on businesses, in order to redirect the jobs to help people with lower incomes.

The web portal reported that the idea is not totally theoretical as EU lawmakers considered a proposal to tax robot owners to pay for training for workers who lose their jobs, though on February 16 the legislators ultimately rejected it.

Meanwhile, Mr Gates sent out another warning that tens of millions of people could be killed by bio-terrorism. He was speaking at the Munich security conference. Mr Gates, who has spent the past 20 years funding a global health campaign, said: “We ignore the link between health security and international security at our peril.

“The next epidemic could originate on the computer screen of a terrorist intent on using genetic engineering to create a synthetic version of the smallpox virus ... or a super contagious and deadly strain of the flu,” he said.

“Whether it occurs by a quirk of nature or at the hand of a terrorist, epidemiologists say a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year. And they say there is a reasonable probability the world will experience such an outbreak in the next 10 to 15 years.”