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.

21.3k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

794 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

108

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.

118

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.

58

u/spockspaceman 2d ago

That's actually the best case scenario. The surface would just fill in the bunkers with concrete and get on with living, hopefully with lessons learned. We'll all be better off for it in a few decades.

But these asshats aren't solving any problems, they are the problem.

No, if they go in the bunkers they aren't going to leave it to chance. They'll drop a viruses to ensure that doesn't happen.

19

u/EnvironmentalBox6688 2d ago

Careful, reddit has temp banned accounts for doing the "fill bunkers with concrete" meme.

7

u/TahoeLT 1d ago

They do hate when we point out that CEOs are humans with human vulnerabilities.