PERHAPS it was Charlie Chaplin whose genius had foretold the future of humanity through his 1936 silent classic Modern Times in which a factory worker, repeating day after day the same mechanical gestures, turns into a robot. Today many industries employ huge numbers of automated clones that perform jobs held by human labourers only less than a decade ago.

Experts say within the next twenty years as many as 35pc of the employments could be destroyed by massive automatisation of industries and the best way to compensate the jobless workers would be to make the robots pay taxes.

One fervent advocate of the idea is the French socialist politician Benoit Hamon who badly lost in the first round of the presidential election last Sunday. To everyone’s surprise he was backed in his campaign by the richest man in the world, Bill Gates.

The industrialists on their part argue that forcing the robots to pay taxes is out of the question as developing them to perform very particular mechanical tasks, and then maintaining their shipshape already costs them a lot of money.

Gates’ response to this argument is accommodative though persistent. He says if the robots pay modest and non-prohibitive amounts as taxes, governments could use the money in a number of domains where mechanisation is unthinkable — such as schools, childcare institutions, homes for handicapped, aged people and Alzheimer’s patients.

In a recent interview given to an economics magazine, the former candidate Benoit Hamon says: “According to the economic system currently in place, the more profits a company makes through larger employments and increased productivity, the more income taxes it contributes into the collective system. But imagine the situation if only automated clones work in factories. They will remain unnamed and naturally unaccounted for. This may sound as a banal, even flat and uninteresting idea at the moment, but restraining manufacturers from dodging taxes will become more and more difficult and will eventually become catastrophic for the future global economy.”

The unsuccessful presidential hopeful goes even a step further:

“Let us imagine a human labourer in a factory creating, say, the wealth of a hundred thousand euros per year. This amount is currently systematically taxed but that will certainly not be the case for the imminent automated replacements of human workers. It is simple mathematics to reach the conclusion that in the future extra revenues will remain undeclared and will eventually end up in secret overseas bank accounts.”

Then there are those who believe forcing companies to pay robot taxes won’t solve the threatening challenges that automation will pose before the world economy. The governments on the other hand should rather focus on using corporate tax revenues to create preferably free or low-cost training programmes to prepare people to work alongside automation, they say.

Apparently there are no easy answers to the growing divide between the rich and the poor which will only accelerate in an automated age of Modern Times, leaving behind unskilled workers at a distinct disadvantage.

This may come to you as a surprise that a number of international institutions are also taking these ideas very seriously. On the Jan 18 this year the European Parliament, though it rejected the suggestion of imposing immediate robot taxes, passed a resolution with the aim of creating a code of ethical conduct for artificial intelligence in the industries.

The driving force behind the proposal, European Parliament member Mady Delvaux-Stehres, commented: “I am pleased that the EU adopted my idea even if it did not take into account my suggestion of immediately going ahead with robot taxation.”

The Modern Times manufacturers, to refer once more to the Charlie Chaplin chef-d’oeuvre, were pleased that the vote went against a robot tax which could slow down their industrial innovations, as they seem to believe.

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, April 30th, 2017