Artificial intelligence and robots are poised to disrupt many industries and displace employees. Bill Gates and a few European lawmakers consider these robotics must be paying revenue tax.

It is no secret that the robotic revolution is coming, and sure jobs will undeniably be casualties. As soon as these jobs are taken over by robots, one query that arises is what happens to the revenue tax that used to return from the human worker. Microsoft founder Bill Gates thinks the answer is easy: Tax the robotics.

In a latest Quartz video, Gates defined that if, for example, a human employee does $50,000 value of labor, that earnings is taxed. “If a robotic is available in to do the identical factor, you’d assume that we would tax the robotic at an identical stage,” Gates said in the video.

Gates defined that the aim of enabling robotics at scale is to unlock human labor to take on duties that require human empathy, similar to educating and caring for the elderly. So, if a manufacturing unit employee is changed by a robotic, they may probably be retrained to fill one of the roles that require extra human understanding.

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However, if these employees are displaced from their manufacturing job, for example, Gates stated that it’s not possible to surrender the revenue tax that was previously generated.

“A few of it could possibly come on the profits which can be generated by the labor-saving effectivity there,” Gates stated in the video. “A few of it could possibly come directly in some kind of robotic tax. I do not think the robotic firms are going to be outraged that there may be a tax.”

Gates is not the one one proposing such a tax, as European lawmakers advisable a robotic tax in a draft report written up by the European parliament back in May 2016. The draft urges the legislature to think about the implications of AI and robotics that it stated “seem poised to unleash a brand new industrial revolution.”

The draft report means that the robotic owner pay taxes if the robots start changing massive numbers of employees, or that they make a contribution to social security. It additionally proposes the thought of creating owners register their robots with authorities, and be held accountable for harm to property or individuals, or for the destruction of jobs.

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