Robot Tax Controversy and How to Legislate a Robot Tax

초록

The “Fourth Industrial Revolution” isn’t just about industry, it’s about the system of society and the economic structure. AI robots will replace the thinking and decision-making of human beings. While there is a long-term disagreement, there is a short-term agreement on the impact of automation in terms of job loss and significant disruption. The prediction of many experts is that future technological advances will be different from the past. As a result, tax revenues would be reduced if the massive displacement would happen. At the same time more financial funds would be needed for reemployment and retraining the labors. In that regard, many scholars have proposed a robot tax or automation tax. There are many significant hurdles, as discussed below. (1) What is a taxable robot? (2) Is a robot tax punitive or sin tax? (3) The problem of legal personality (4) Who actually pays a tax? (5) Can we set a robot tax as earmarked or general? (6) Tax base (7) International tax competition and avoidance etc. In spite of these many hurdles, we have to discuss the law and we have to try to lay it down. This is because the incentives need to encourage innovating and improve social welfare. So, what I propose is a concrete robot tax that goes through the stages of robot technology. At a stage before passing the Turing Test, robots at this stage will not be limited to AI robots, but will be expanded to include automation. One option is to disallow deductions or tax credits from corporate income tax for capital investments in automation machines. We can create incentives for companies that employ human workers, or we can allow tax preference for the retraining, the re-education of workers. Another option is to levy an incremental automation tax as workers are laid off or replaced by machines. At stage after passing the Turing Test, we can give the robots legal personality. After that, the robots would have the ability of financial capacity, so that they would be a taxpayer apart from their owner.

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