Robots are getting smarter, but may not replace us —

Humanoid Robot for Teachers and Autistic children

Surgical robots may not replace surgeons in the near future, but how about nurses? Will occupational therapists lose jobs to social robots who can take care of autistic children? Will teachers lose jobs to social robots who can teach classes and answer questions? Will restaurant servers lose jobs to robots who can welcome customers?

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Robot tax and Universal Basic Income:
answers to automation and job loss?

Ryan Abbott, a professor studying law and health sciences at the University of Surrey in London, believes the world should prepare for the day when many workers lose their jobs to robots.

He proposed a robot tax that would raise money for the government to offset the loss of income tax. Others proposed a universal basic income (U.B.I.) for fired workers.

“Both the practice of law and the practice of medicine are areas that are going to be profoundly disrupted by advances in artificial intelligence and robotics,” Abbott said. “I realized that the tax is critically important to economic incentives and that have a strong influence on how technologies are developed.”

Abbott said that the current tax policies make using machines cheaper, which are “unintentionally encouraging automation” even when machines are not efficient as human workers.

In his latest paper in March, he proposed getting rid of payroll taxes and increase corporate taxes.

“We want them to compete fairly without taxes. So if a person is better, we use a person, if a machine is better, use a machine,” Abbott said.

The U.S. industries most likely to be affected by automation
Infogram

According to the McKinsey Global Institute, food service and accommodations have the highest potential for automation in the U.S. because cooking and serving food involve many predictable physical activities which are more likely to be automated.

But some experts don’t think robot tax works in practice. “If you look at the different proposals that are out there, most of them are not very specific about really key items such as how do you define what a robot is, or what kind of tax, and who is actually going to pay it,” said Robert Kovacev, a partner of a Washington, D.C.-based international law firm Steptoe & Johnson.

Kovacev is worried that taxing robots would slow down innovation. “By definition, if you tax robots, you're making it more expensive to use devices that have either increase quality or reduce costs,” Kovacev said.

But Abbott said taxing robots will encourage more efficient technologies and automation.

Some also worried that the various definition of robots would affect how to collect the tax. “If you define it too narrowly, then you will not collect any tax,” Kovacev said.

Robert Seamans, an associate professor of management and organizations at New York University, also thinks taxing robot is a bad idea. “It's not clear what people mean when they say a tax on robots,” Seamans said.

Kovacev believes that no matter how you design the tax, ultimately it would be passed on to the consumers and make goods more expensive.

“The biggest problem is that so much of general revenue is based on human labor, payroll taxes or income taxes on wages,” Kovacev said. “If there's dramatic job loss as a result of automation, there will be dramatic revenue loss at the same time, the income taxes and payroll taxes will go down.”

The U.S. government might lose revenue because of automation, human workers might lose their jobs. To ease the pain for fired workers, some tech leaders such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg proposed the universal basic income. Also, in February, universal basic income officially became part of California’s Democratic Party platform.

Kovacev said the biggest obstacle facing the proposal is figuring out who would pay for it. “If you're going to have a pretty sizable transfer of income, the money has to come from someone,” Kovacev said. “It's hard to see how you could finance U.B.I. without a massive increase in tax rates on somewhere.”

Brishen Rogers, an associate professor of law at Temple University, is not sold on this idea. “If the net effect of the program is to increase the number of resources that poor people in the low and middle class, then the money has to come from the upper middle class and the wealthy,” Rogers said.

But Rogers doesn’t think universal basic income is the best way to deal with job losses. In his eyes, the best way is creating more “economic democracy” in which workers and customers can have a broader voice, and can engage with policymakers around major economic questions.

Some think that setting up universal basic income would make minimum wage unnecessary, but Rogers doesn’t think a basic income can replace minimum wage. He said that minimum wage helps ensure redistribution of wealth from shareholders and bondholders to workers, and from managers to workers. “It creates incentives for companies to actually treat workers well,” Rogers said.

Semanus said the policymakers should expand some of our current policies instead of “getting rid of all of the existing safety nets that we have and replacing it with a universal basic income.” He said, for example, the current income tax credit has been shown to incentivize people to get the training that they need to find a new job.

Semanus said that talking about policies that will help with the retraining of workers is more important than addressing new policies to deal with the possibility that workers will start to lose their jobs to robots.

Abbott offers two solutions: Retrain workers for more sophisticated types of work and for professions requiring a high degree of interpersonal relationships. In these cases, robots aren’t a good substitute.