"Meanwhile, Microsoft founder Bill Gates recommended last week that robots who took over human jobs should pay taxes."
sounds good to me, let's start with the combines and weaving looms as they took away a lot of jobs, not to mention all the stable hands put out of work from those horse less carriages.
Slowing down that long-past change a bit with a small tax (Gates is talking of slowing, not stopping this change with taxes) might have been useful: the Scottish clearances might not have happened so suddenly (which affected my family), cities might have had more time to cope with the population influx that caused widespread cholera and typhoid epidemics, just for starters. Surely there's some room for maneuver between a medieval rejection of change on the one hand, and absolute pitilessness on the other.
I guess I was reading a different article, as there was no mention of slowing or stopping. I would say that companies should be taxed more when they use more efficient robots to replace workers for the simple reason they are more profitable. Most companies probably do not pay the same amount of taxes as inefficient human workers employed by them would but that is not an issue with the robots but corporate tax breaks. I don't have the answer but taxing robot workers is not realistic, where do you draw the line?
I also find ironic the fact that now that Bill Gates has made his billions by selling products that have done and continue to do exactly what he suggests cost jobs, should somehow be taxed. I agree that innovation disrupts the status quo and produces a redistribution of wealth that in many cases is very uneven but keep government out of it please.
I remember margarine being taxed, not being allowed to be colored, etc. The most remarkable taxes are "practical" in the only important sense - that they bring in more than it costs to adminster them. Taxing profits wouldn't slow automation, without a differential in the tax. Mr. Gates seems quite unafraid of irony, I agree. I think it's part of having lived for a long time.