Our socioeconomic system is facing an existential threat from AI. In our capitalist society, most people depend on jobs to sustain themselves. The U.S. government, in turn, relies heavily on taxing the income of individual workers for revenue. As artificial intelligence progressively eliminates job opportunities, a growing number of individuals will face severe job insecurity, leading to a corresponding decline in federal revenue. Radical action is needed now to steer away from a dystopian collapse toward better possibilities.

Tax laws, for example, don't currently take automated workers into account. While human employees contribute payroll and income taxes, an automated "employee" doesn't, Abbott noted. Governments could lose out on quite a bit of income tax as AI becomes more prevalent and possibly displaces more human workers. Granted, that argument only works if displaced employees don't find other jobs. Abbott predicted that that may happen as AI becomes smarter at a rate that outpaces people's ability to learn new skills or find job training.

This question originally appeared on Quora. Capitalism works reasonably well as an economic system - provided that human beings are required to do effectively all of the labor. It worked far better than previous systems (slavery most notably). But capitalism has a long list of grievances, not the least of which is that human labor has slowly become devalued over time. The reason for that was simple: the assembly line, and the company that made its profits off of it, needed those workers.

A tax on robots is one of those ideas that sounds attractive, and when it's put forward by someone with the credibility of Bill Gates, as it was in a recent interview with Quartz magazine, you can guarantee it will generate a lot of interest. If he, of all people, says taxing robots is a good idea, then surely it is worth considering? At first pass, the idea feels like common sense. After all, if robots replace workers but don't generate tax revenue, it means not only that the funds available for government services are substantially diminished, but that inequality – already at record levels in developed nations – is likely to increase. Wages that would have been earned by human workers, now displaced by robots, will go straight to profits, increasing the wealth gap between those who own the robots and the growing pool of unemployed workers.

Many people worry that robots will replace human jobs, but Bill Gates has a solution: a robot tax. As robots begin to infiltrate the workforce, why shouldn't they be taxed just as humans are? In a recent interview with Quartz, Gates argued that in order to offset job losses due to automation, governments should tax companies that use robots. "Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed, and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things," Gates said. "If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you'd think that we'd tax the robot at a similar level."

The income from human labor gets taxed. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. The income from human labor gets taxed.

Robots are taking human jobs. But Bill Gates believes that governments should tax companies' use of them, as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of automation and to fund other types of employment. It's a striking position from the world's richest man and a self-described techno-optimist who co-founded Microsoft, one of the leading players in artificial-intelligence technology. In a recent interview with Quartz, Gates said that a robot tax could finance jobs taking care of elderly people or working with kids in schools, for which needs are unmet and to which humans are particularly well suited. He argues that governments must oversee such programs rather than relying on businesses, in order to redirect the jobs to help people with lower incomes.

Just because a worker isn't technically "alive" doesn't mean it can make money for nothing, according to Bill Gates. In a recent interview with Quartz editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney, the billionaire philanthropist explained that robot labor should get taxed just like human labor -- primarily as a way to maintain funding for society's many social services. "You can't just give up that income tax," Gates said. Economists and future-minded techies alike, Gates included, have been discussing the looming threat of robotic automation for several years now. An Oxford report from 2013 found robots could displace up to 50% of jobs between 2023 and 2033.

Europe is preparing for a robot revolution. European lawmakers have proposed that robots be equipped with emergency "kill switches" to prevent them from causing excessive damage. Legislators have also suggested that robots be insured and even be made to pay taxes. The proposal on robot governance was approved by the European Parliament's legal affairs committee on Thursday. The issue will now be considered by the European Commission, which is the bloc's top regulator.

That's the takeaway from a draft report on robotics produced by the European Parliament, which warns that artificial intelligence and increased automation present legal and ethical challenges that could have dire consequences. "Within the space of a few decades [artificial intelligence] could surpass human intellectual capacity in a manner which, if not prepared for, could pose a challenge to humanity's capacity to control its own creation and ... the survival of the species," the draft states. The report offers a series of recommendations to prepare Europe for this advanced breed of robot, which it says now "seem poised to unleash a new industrial revolution."