robot tax

plural robot taxes

1. A legislative strategy to delay or counteract the downsides of large-scale automation.

   It was South Korea, the ‘most robotized country in the world’, that imposed the first de facto robot tax when in 2018 it decreased the tax break businesses could take for investing in automation.

   2020, Noreena Hertz, chapter 8, in The Lonely Century, Hodder & Stoughton, →ISBN

   2 more examples

   In a recent interview with Quartz, Gates said that a robot tax could finance jobs taking care of elderly people or working with kids in schools, for which needs are unmet and to which humans are particularly well suited.

   2017 February 17, Kevin J. Delaney, “The robot that takes your job should pay taxes, says Bill Gates”, in Quartz

   Bill Gates recently made a case for taxing companies that own robots, which could delay their implementation and provide some money to retrain people whose jobs are lost. The San Francisco board of supervisors is considering a so-called robot tax.

   2017 October 6, Claire Martin, “A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?”, in The New York Times, →ISSN