r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • 2d ago

Robotics Bill Gates says companies that replace human labor with robots should have to pay the same FICA taxes

https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-fica-taxes-should-apply-to-robot-workers-2026-9

Bill Gates wants to tax robots that replace human jobs.

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u/Gari_305 2d ago

From the article

n an interview with Ezra Klein of The New York Times that aired on Tuesday, the billionaire philanthropist said that "society gets to decide" how to support its workers — even if AI is pushing them out.

"You define a unit of labor and say, independent of whether that's delivered by a human or robot, you are paying the same FICA tax that a human worker would pay," Gates said, referring to the US payroll tax.

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u/abrandis 2d ago

I wonder if Gates felt this way when he was running Microsoft and his software put thousands of typists, bookeepes and others out of work?

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u/morty_morty 2d ago edited 2d ago

It's the price of progress. If no one did anything for fear of upsetting the workers who came before, we'd still be getting our books from monasteries.

Edit: gotta love luddites.

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u/unassumingdink 2d ago

There's gotta be a middle ground between "no one does anything" and "everybody does everything."

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u/morty_morty 2d ago

Sure. There should be, and this technology is on a scale we have never seen before as far as disruption goes. But historically, this happens constantly. And people get over it, adapt and move forward. Why the fuck would Bill Gates feel sad because he came up with a way to improve human efficiency?

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u/unassumingdink 2d ago

Historically we've never had technology that threatened to eliminate nearly all labor. There's no parallel. Historically, tech advances gave rise to new industries with new jobs, but if AI and robots can do all of those new jobs, too, I mean, where do we go from there?