GoKawiilBill Gates renews call for robots to pay FICA-style payroll taxes
Bill Gates told New York Times columnist Ezra Klein that automation replacing human workers should trigger the same FICA payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare. He proposed defining a unit of labor so that work performed by robots or AI would be taxed like human wages, funded by the savings companies gain from not employing people. This echoes an August essay in which Gates also called for taxing AI tokens and noted that robots, unlike human employees, can be written off as business expenses.
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Gates frames the proposal as a way to preserve tax revenue and fund social safety nets as automation potentially displaces large numbers of workers, suggesting society retains choice over economic tradeoffs rather than deferring entirely to cost efficiency. His repeated warnings, spanning nearly a decade, indicate growing concern among tech leaders about the fiscal and social fallout of rapid AI adoption, though implementing such a tax would require significant policy and definitional changes that remain unresolved.
- Gates wants robots and AI systems to incur FICA-equivalent payroll taxes when replacing human workers.
- He argues the funding could come from employer savings on no longer paying human wages.
- The proposal revives ideas from his August essay, which also called for taxing AI tokens and closing robot tax write-off loopholes.
Source: techspot.com — Rob Thubron, 2026-10-01
Published there as: “Bill Gates says robots should pay FICA taxes when they replace human workers”
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