Bill Gates Wants a Robot Tax and Jobs Humans Can't Be Fired From

In brief

• Bill Gates published a nearly 6,000-word essay on Gates Notes calling the AI transition "one of the most turbulent times in human history"
• He's proposing a tax on AI tokens and robots to offset the payroll-tax advantage automation already has over hiring.
• Gates puts a ceiling of roughly 40% of jobs under the most aggressive version of that carve-out.

Buy a worker, pay payroll tax. Buy a robot, write it off. Bill Gates thinks the math employers are faced with is a problem.

In an essay titled "The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical," the Microsoft co-founder argues there is an asymmetry in the current job market: employers pay payroll taxes when they hire a person, but a robot generally gets written off right away as a business expense. "The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines," he wrote.

His fix is a tax on AI tokens—the units language models use to chew through text and other data—plus a tax on robots themselves.

It's not a new pitch. Gates first floated a robot tax in 2017 and got laughed off by economists who called it a tax on productivity dressed up as a tax on progress.

He's not backing down this time. Gates believes that a usage tax changes employer incentives directly, unlike a corporate tax that only bites into profits—which can run thin in a hypercompetitive market. Labor already gets taxed through payroll levies. Robots depreciate and owe nothing to Social Security.