Home | Databases | WorldLII | Search | Feedback Edited Legal Collections Data

"Preface" [2019] ELECD 1229; in Oberson, Xavier (ed), "Taxing Robots" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019) xi

Book Title: Taxing Robots

Editor(s): Oberson, Xavier

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Section Title: Preface

Number of pages: 2

Extract:

Preface
In early 2016, I started to investigate the possibility of taxing artificial
intelligence (AI) in general, and robots in particular, aiming at finding a
viable solution to the situation in which, as a consequence of disruption
in the economy, numerous human workers could lose their jobs and may
not find, in sufficient time, a new or decent place to work.
As a result of this research, I published numerous articles and, notably
in October 2016, in a provocative ironic statement in Le Temps, a Swiss
newspaper, I suggested that: "Maybe, one day, the robots might refuse to
pay their taxes!" As a follow-up, on February 2017, at the conference for
the opening of the academic semester of the Geneva University, I raised
the question of the feasibility of a tax on robots or their usage.
In parallel, as of 2016, the EU Parliament has also initiated studies in
relation to the fascinating issue of granting a legal personality to robots.
On 16 February 2017, the EU Parliament finally rejected this idea, as
well as a recommendation in favor of implementing a tax on the use of
robots. The next day, Bill Gates publicly announced that he was in favor
of taxing robots. This issue, in the meantime, has been debated world-
wide, raising without any surprise, highly controversial opinions.
This book intends to find solutions in relation to the taxation of robots
and to show how and to what extent a tax on robots, or on the use ...