Tax the Robot, says Bill Gates

Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking join issue on AI and job losses

    The noise around AI and job losses is gathering higher decibels with the rich and influential adding their voice to the rising chorus.

The latest salvo has come from none other than Microsoft founder and the World’s richest man Bill Gates who has suggested that robots that take jobs should be taxed. In an interview to tech portal Quartz he argues that government must oversee such programs rather than rely on businesses to redirect jobs to help people with lower incomes.

This observation follows close on the heels of a similar observation by Tesla chief Elon Musk who said there would be fewer and fewer jobs that robots could not do better. Therefore, the powers that be will have to consider a universal basic income for such populations that lose their jobs, he suggested speaking at the World Government Summit 2017 in Dubai earlier this week.  

Such concerns are not an isolated phenomenon coming close on the heels of the endorsement of 23 Asilomar AI Principles  by Musk and theoretical physicist, cosmologist Stephen Hawking among other well known personalities that suggest safeguards, ethical, economic and social,  while adopting AI across fields. These principles were prepared and unveiled in conjunction with the Beneficial AI Conference held in Boston in early January. AI researchers from academia and industry, and thought leaders in economics, law, ethics, and philosophy gathered to discuss issues in AI for five days. 

Both the timing of this conference and the new voices of concern being added are not an isolated case with governments and think tanks highlighting contentious issues concerning the unabated adoption of AI across industries.  While the EU has been talking about for some time now, one of the last acts by the lame duck Obama Administration was to issue a policy document to deal with the adverse effects of AI on jobs in late December 2016.

Quite understandably, while the West seems to be more worried by the fast adoption of AI, it is actually the developing nations that are likely to be more impact by it in the coming years a topic touched upon in an earlier post on this blog. In fact latest analysis based on World Bank data, suggests that 77% and 69% of jobs China and India at risk compared to 47% in the US

The Indian IT industry will be the hardest hit with automation already showing its impact on Indian IT jobs. Infosys has “released” 8000-9000 employees in the past one year as lower end jobs have been automated, the Economic Times said in an article quoting the company’s HR head Krishnamurthy Shankar. Infosys has been releasing 2000 people every quarter. These employees are now being trained for other higher end jobs, he said.

More than the scare of robots and intelligent assembly lines taking away factory jobs, it is white collar tech jobs that employ the young, and contact center jobs that employ the young and the not so highly educated, that are under threat.