比尔·盖茨为如何确保人类在“AI就业末日”中继续获得收入提出了一套方案：向机器人征税。这位亿万富翁慈善家周二在接受《纽约时报记者埃兹拉·克莱因的采访时表示，即使人工智能正在取代劳动者，“社会也有权决定”如何支持劳动者。盖茨说：“你设定一个劳动单位，然后规定，无论这一劳动由人还是机器人完成，都缴纳与人类劳动者相同的FICA税。”
Bill Gates has a plan to ensure that humans keep getting paid in an AI jobs apocalypse: Tax the robots. In an interview with Ezra Klein of The New York Times that aired on Tuesday, the billionaire philanthropist said that "society gets to decide" how to support its workers — even if AI is pushing them out. "You define a unit of labor and say, independent of whether that's delivered by a human or robot, you are paying the same FICA tax that a human worker would pay," Gates said, referring to the US payroll tax.
他所说的FICA税是美国的一项工资税。FICA税的运作方式是，员工从工资中缴纳一部分，用于社会保障和医疗保险等福利，雇主则按相同金额缴款。盖茨说，对取代人类工作的机器人征税，既能为公民提供经济安全网，也能为政府持续创造税收收入。他说：“经济信号表明使用人工智能的成本更低，但这并不意味着社会就必须这么做。”
FICA taxes work by having workers pay portions of their paychecks toward benefits like Social Security and Medicare, with employers matching the workers' contributions. Taxing robots that take human jobs would ensure both a monetary safety net for citizens and continued tax revenue for the government, Gates said. "Just because the economic signals say that it'd be lower cost to use an AI doesn't mean society has to do that," he said.
盖茨于1975年共同创办微软，此前曾警告，人工智能和机器人技术即将对白领岗位造成毁灭性冲击。他在8月发表的一篇近6000字的文章中称，文职岗位已经受到“适度”影响，并推测蓝领岗位也将很快受到波及。盖茨表示，尽管实体机器人在发展进度上落后于人工智能系统，但人们低估了人形机器人迎头赶上的速度。在文章中，盖茨还表示，对人工智能令牌征税“会稍微减缓人们放弃人类劳动的潮流，并为劳动再培训和建立更强的安全网筹集资金”。
Gates, who cofounded Microsoft in 1975, has previously warned that AI and robotics are poised to lay waste to white-collar jobs. In a nearly 6,000-word essay he published in August, he said office jobs are already being hit "modestly," and speculated that blue-collar jobs are soon to follow. Though Gates said that physical robots are lagging behind AI systems in development, he said people underestimate how soon humanoid figures will catch up. In the essay, Gates also said that taxing AI tokens "would slow the rush away from human labor a little and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net."
认为人工智能热潮需要新税收方案的并非盖茨一人。Anthropic首席执行官达里奥·阿莫代伊呼吁制定更有力的税收政策，可能专门针对人工智能企业，以便让这项技术带来的收益得到更广泛分享；OpenAI则提议把与自动化劳动挂钩的税收纳入应对人工智能冲击的整体方案。
Gates is not alone in arguing that the AI boom needs a new approach to taxation. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for more robust tax policies — potentially targeted at AI companies — to spread the technology's gains more broadly, while OpenAI has proposed taxes tied to automated labor as part of a wider plan to respond to AI-driven disruption.
2017年，盖茨在接受当时担任Quartz首席执行官的凯文·德莱尼采访时，首次提出对机器人征税。近10年后，这一想法仍萦绕在他心头。“我仍然是它的坚定支持者，”盖茨在自己的文章中写道。“虽然这并不能彻底解决人工智能带来的威胁，但它是明智应对措施的一部分。”
Gates first called for robot taxes in 2017 during an interview with Kevin Delaney, who was then the CEO of Quartz. Nearly 10 years later, the idea remains on his mind. "I'm still a big proponent of it," Gates wrote in his essay. "Although it is not the whole solution to the threat of AI, it is part of a wise response."