One San Francisco Politician Is Exploring A Tax On Robots
One San Francisco Politician Is Exploring A Tax On Robots
Taxing companies that use robots to help pay for the
workers they’ve displaced has been floated as a theoretical solution to a
post-automation world. Now San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim is looking into
whether it’s what the tech capital needs.
BY BEN SCHILLER 04.04.17 | 6:30 AM
With fears about the job-killing effects of automation
growing every day, once unthinkable ideas are starting to get an airing. A
universal basic income (UBI)–where the government gives everyone enough money
to live on–has lots of supporters, especially in Silicon Valley. And now some
prominent individuals are calling for a tax on robots. The thinking: If you
make robots more expensive, there will be more public funds to help retrain
workers (or pay for that basic income)–and the higher cost might keep some
companies from buying robots and quickly tanking the employment rate.
Bill Gates recently called for a robot tax in an
interview with Quartz, arguing that it could slow the shift to a more
robot-centric future, allowing society to catch its breath. Moreover, he said,
it could raise revenues to pay humans for more human types of work, like
looking after children or the elderly.
Gates’s position was shocking because you don’t often
hear tech executives, even ex ones, arguing with unfettered tech progress, and
because, as Quartz pointed out, Microsoft is a big developer of artificial
intelligence. But the CEO turned mega-philanthropist may have made the idea
more acceptable for others to consider and debate. And now Jane Kim, one of 11
city supervisors in San Francisco, has begun to explore more seriously what it
would look like for a city to actually implement such a tax.
Kim says she read Gates’s interview and wondered if a
robot tax might help the city deal with inequality. “We need to think about
investments in our society that don’t exacerbate the wealth and income gaps
that we already see today,” she tells Fast Company. “We don’t want to become a
third-world country where there’s a big divide between the very rich and very
poor.” San Francisco has one of the biggest income gaps in the country,
according to figures from the Brookings Institution.
Kim, who represents areas like Union Square, the
Tenderloin, and Civic Center, is setting up a working group to consider how an
automation tax might work. She hopes it will include representatives from the
tech community, academia, and unions, and that it can work through some of the
practical questions. These include how much revenue the city stands to lose
from lost payroll taxes due to automation, and what industries might be most
affected. “It’s not only going to be manufacturing and truck drivers. It’s also
going to be restaurants, hotel workers, and health care, which form a strong
base of employment in the city,” she says. The tax would be paid by companies
adopting robots over workers, not by robot-makers.
Kim sees revenue raised from the tax going toward
education. She notes that an increasing number of jobs require a college
degree, meaning that the tax could have a role in making college more
affordable (the city is already taxing high-end real estate to pay for free
tuition). Like Gates, she also favors exploring ways to slow the automation
wave, allowing government and business to put in policies that help people
transition. “It may be that government needs to play a role in regulating
automation over time, so we can absorb job displacement at a rate that’s more
sustainable for our country,” she says.
Many economists are skeptical about the workability of an
automation tax, not least because it’s hard to define exactly what harmful automation
is. If McDonald’s replaces a server with a robot, it’s clear that a worker has
lost a job to a machine. But if an office puts in an answering machine, it may
be that the worker is just doing something else than answering phones all day.
Automation could have positive effects, for instance allowing people to avoid
dangerous work, or to retrain and move up the wage scale.
These concerns were enough to derail a robot tax proposal
put forward by some European lawmakers this year. But, a report from the European
Parliament did suggest other radical ideas, including requiring companies to
report robot adoption, and the concept of “electronic personhood” where robots
would have some of the rights and responsibilities of human beings.
Kim doesn’t claim that taxing automation is a silver
bullet, only that it’s worth pursuing along with other measures, including a
basic income guarantee. She supports UBI, but points out that many proposals
are un-funded, unlike the robot tax, which both has a social effect (more jobs,
less automation) and generates money for other things.
Most of all, Kim–possibly the first public official in
America to publicly support a robot tax–is keen to experiment. “We are the
center of the tech world here in San Francisco. There is a broad concern about
automation and job displacement in the future,” she says. “We want to be the
first to put ideas out there, so they can be explored. Then we want others to
follow.”
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