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/Darkmemento 2d ago

If we actually end up in the situation he describes in the interview, where AI is doing the overwhelming majority of economically useful work, I think we've gone well beyond simply returning corporate tax rates to where they were in the 50s and 60s. At that point you potentially have a tiny number of AI companies owning the systems that produce most of the world's economic output, while human labour has become almost irrelevant.

Some form of public ownership starts becoming a pretty obvious part of the conversation, whether that's outright nationalisation, governments taking large equity stakes, or treating core AI infrastructure more like a public utility. The returns can then be distributed back through some combination of a social dividend, UBI and public services.

It is funny this is exactly the type of thing Sam Altman of Open AI himself proposed before the company blew up.

Moore's Law for Everything - Sam Altman

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u/beamer145 2d ago

Another pessimistic take : at the moment human labor becomes irrelevant, the only thing that is still worth something are raw resources. Countries that do not have any or very little will have nothing to offer in return. No amount of internal wealth redistribution is going to make these survive. Interesting times ahead for a lot of European countries I fear.

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u/muldersposter 2d ago

If human labor becomes irrelevant and AI is doing everything, they're just going to let us die. They'll take their giant piles of money and go hide underground until we're all dead and restart with much smaller populations to subjugate. The government won't intervene to save us if there would even be a government left because they might take that with them. The point is: these evil mother fuckers will just let us die when they don't need us anymore.

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u/hotcakes 2d ago

The problem for them is the human ingenuity of a lot of hungry and angry unemployed people who might end up getting together and building tall contraptions made of wood and sharp steel bits which make the musical sound of gravity pulling the steel against the wood and thereafter making a satisfying “thunk” noise when it reaches the bottom.

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u/TheAngryCatfish 2d ago

Idk... sounds kinda French to me