Is it time to tax robots?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 4 June 2019
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With ever more jobs at risk of automation, should the automatons be taxed the same as humans?
Ed Butler speaks to Dr Carl Frey of the Oxford Martin School, who co-authored a report five years ago claiming that almost half of US jobs could made redundant by emerging technology in the next 30 years. His new book, The Technology Trap, looks to the history of the Industrial Revolution as a guide to current developments. He worries that millions of workers could soon find their careers devastated, while the ultimate benefits of technology may only felt decades in the future.
It is perhaps then not surprising that many politicians, academics and businessmen - including Microsoft founder Bill Gates - now advocate a tax on automation to level the playing field with humans. We pit an advocate of such a tax - Ryan Abbott of the University of Surrey - against critic Janet Bastiman, chief scientist at StoryStream, which provides AI services to the automotive sector.
(Picture: Robot call centre; Credit: PhonlamaiPhoto/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. Today, the human cost of greater automation in our lives. |
| 0:10.0 | Automation has recently hit manufacturing cities in those places. Marriage rates decline, crime has been rising and mortality rates go up due to suicide, alcohol and drug-related causes. |
| 0:22.5 | Are the machines taking over our jobs too fast, just as we tax people? |
| 0:27.7 | Is it time to start taxing the robots? |
| 0:30.8 | Robots need to be taxed to make this whole thing efficient. |
| 0:34.4 | And there's a lot of ways you could do that. |
| 0:36.0 | We're going to have to tax capital more |
| 0:37.8 | once the labour is capital. That's all to come on Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:45.6 | The rise of the robot, taking over our lives and stealing our jobs. It's become a major |
| 0:51.4 | theme of public discussion on shows like Business Daily for some years now. |
| 0:56.1 | Take writing, for example, compiling logical, meaningful text based on a known subject area. |
| 1:02.7 | In February this year, the non-profit research group OpenAI, announced a new artificial intelligence application, |
| 1:09.1 | one that was able to generate completely original text. |
| 1:12.8 | First, they got it to read 8 million web pages, like you do, in order to train it to |
| 1:17.9 | parrot any kind of writing that you might imagine you would put on there. |
| 1:22.0 | Then they asked a lowly human, someone like me, to feed the app a few lines that the app hadn't seen before. And then, |
| 1:29.1 | by the magic of AI, it would continue the text, making it up as it went along. And the question was, |
| 1:34.8 | could people tell the difference? There you go. That was the voice of our friendly AI text |
| 1:39.7 | reader. Well, the researchers at OpenAI claimed that the results were so stunningly realistic |
| 1:45.0 | that they decided they couldn't release the software to the public for fear it would be put |
| 1:48.9 | to malicious purposes. See what you think right now. Here are a few examples of the tech as they |
| 1:55.2 | applied it in action, taking on news copy, for example. |
... |
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