Robots, Jobs, Taxes, and Responsibilities

摘要

AI and robots continue to make news. Alarmist headlines used to be about some kind of Terminator developing in the future to dominate and enslave us, like an inferior species. They are now about tireless machines that, like enslaved persons, will make us redundant, replacing and outperforming us more efficiently and cheaply than we can ever be. This master-slave dialectics is not science fiction. On the 16th of February 2017, the plenary session of the European Parliament voted in favour of a resolution to create a new ethical-legal framework according to which robots may qualify as "electronic persons". The Commission does not have to follow the Parliament's recommendations but, if it refuses, it will have to explain why. The following day, on the 17th of February, in an interview with Quartz, Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder, suggested that there should be a tax on robots.