Tax the terminator: call for levy to stop robot takeover at work

For years, we have been warned that the day will come when machines will be able to do our jobs better than we can. Now a leading Chinese economist is offering a time frame. Cai Fang, vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the country's top think tank, and former head of its Population and Labour Economic Research Institute, robots will "definitely" surpass humans in many job skills in 10 to 20 years. Like Microsoft founder Bill Gates and other technology titans, Cai is an advocate of tax policies and other measures to keep robots from putting human workers out of jobs. In February, Gates said governments should levy a tax on the use of robots to fund retraining of those who lose their jobs and to slow down automation.