Robots have at least one unfair advantage over human workers: they do not pay income tax.
Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and the world’s richest man, thinks that should change. It is an idea that until now has been associated more with European socialists than tech industry leaders, and puts him in the unusual position of explicitly arguing for taxes to slow the adoption of new technology.
Mr Gates made his fortune from the spread of PCs, which helped to erase whole categories of workers, from typists to travel agents. But, speaking in an interview with Quartz, he argued that it may be time to deliberately slow the advance of the next job-killing technologies.