Back in 2019, I wrote about the "container tax." In simple terms, this is the additional cost to use containers properly within a cloud-based application. It includes development, operations, and other expenses that containers incur. The goal of leveraging containers is to offset the additional costs with the benefits they offer. Many other technologies come with additional costs, which may or may not justify using that specific technology.

Critics of such an idea have, in the past, argued that any tax on a machine, be it a robot, a car or an AI tax, would be anti-business -- but then it would be stretching credibility to suggest Bill Gates is anti-business. "You ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed of automation," said the co-founder of Microsoft. He warned: "You cross the threshold of job replacement of certain activities all sort of at once. If you want to do [something about] inequality… government's got a big role to play." There are multiple problems with the idea.