Should your Romberba need a W-2?
Probably not, but it is a funny thought during the debate of the most serious subject to know whether or not a robot should pay taxes – and how to do it.
During June Mit Technology Review Emtech Next Event, two experts asserted the two sides of the question in front of an audience of MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Ryan AbbottProfessor of law and health sciences at the University of Surrey, pleaded in favor of tax robots, while Ryan Advent, economist’s economist columnist, pleaded against the idea. The two agreed that there should be a change in tax burden from capital to capital. Advent, however, carried the most audience votes at the end of the debate.
Here are some protruding facts from each of the men’s arguments.
Level the rules of the game for humans and machines
The federal government obtains approximately 50% of its income taxes. If the robots replace human workforce, this funding disappears, said Abbott.
“When companies automatize, the government loses tax revenue, potentially a very large amount depending on the forecasts you believe in the future of automation, and potentially hundreds of billions of dollars per year overall”, he said.
Whatever the automation of impact on human workforce, it will be difficult to compensate with recycling, education and benefits funded by the federal government, if the government has less money to work , said Abbot.
Companies also pay a 6.2% wage tax for Social Security (6.2% twinned by employees). The robots are not on pay. Even if a person is the best choice for a job, companies will want to automate to save money, said Abbot.
“To level the rules of the game for people and machines, you will have to remove the tax advantages that machines have on people or create new tax advantages so that people compensate (machines) at the moment,” said Abbott . “A tax on robots really says that we have to tax the capital more than we impose work.”
Abbott has suggested a variation in robots taxes, for example: increasing taxes for high profit companies that count a lot on automation.
“Yes, there is a limit to how much you can increase taxes on corporate on capital gains without having any problems with this, but there are also ways to be able to increase the part paid by capital companies and reduce this Pain on the workforce to have a better system, “he said.
New technologies can benefit everyone
Avent has not seen the same disastrous future of displaced workers.
“The jobs we think could be lost for automation are not lost insofar as we could expect or even hope at this stage,” said Advent. “There are many ways to watch the data and see this.”
Most robots are used in manufacturing, especially in the automotive industry. But most people do not work in manufacturing, they are in the service sector, said Advent.
AVENT also pointed out that employment figures in other rich countries – such as Japan, Germany and South Korea – despite their high level of robots on the labor market.
“We must also think about the fact that when robots are deployed on the job market, they are generally deployed in cases where jobs are very routine, where it is very easy to describe the actions that the robot must follow,” Said, adding that it is not even clear that these jobs will be available on the road, whether it is a robot or a human fills them.
He also underlined the industrial revolution to illustrate that although it could be frightening to think that machines do more things than humans today, “everyone ends much better”.
“I think it would be just a shame that for lack of ideas or lack of faith in our ability to change the company for the best in response to technology, we have taken measures to try to retain the use of new technologies Who could end up enjoying a lot of people enough, ”said Advent.
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Meredith Somers