The day is coming, experts tell us, when artificial intelligence and robotics will massively disrupt the labor market. Autonomous vehicles will put 3.5 …

Is it time we started taxing robots? Not the robots themselves, of course – their wages remain stuck at zero – but employers who would automate human jobs out of existence. Bill Gates thinks we should: in a recent interview, he argued that we should raise the same amount of money by taxing robots as we would lose in payroll taxes from the humans they supplant. That money could be directed towards more human-dependent jobs, such as caring for the young, old and sick.

Firstly, most people think of automation through the lens of assembly-line logic. Actually, 'automation' is a softer and more pervasive feature of all modern management. Every modern company in the world has been deploying more and more supply chain management (SCM), customer response management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in a bid to automate more and more functions. Rather than Human redundancy, improved HUMAN productivity has been the chief driver.