A Rest of World essay revives the robot-tax idea for AI

In 2017, South Korea's Moon Jae-in administration cut the tax credit companies could claim for investing in automation equipment, from 3% to 1% for large firms, from 5% to 3% for mid-sized ones, with small businesses left at 7%. It was never called a robot tax. But in a Rest of World essay, AGH University professor Alessandro Crimi argues it is still "the closest thing we have to a real-world test case."

Crimi's argument is plain. "When a firm automates, it privatizes the savings from a reduced wage bill while socializing the costs of unemployment," he writes. He frames the fiscal logic the same way: "If productivity increasingly derives from capital rather than labor, continued reliance on labor-based taxation becomes normatively unstable." His proposed instrument is a tax on displacement, paired with structural measures such as a four-day, 32-hour workweek and a universal basic income.

The idea has lost before. The European Parliament rejected a 2017 robot-tax proposal, with lawmakers arguing that taxing machines would hurt business. Crimi concedes a design problem too: as automation moves into software, picking out a "robot" as a taxable unit gets harder. "Retraining programs are a necessary but insufficient response to systemic displacement," he writes.

The essay closes on a historical register rather than a technical one: "the possibility that we are convergent in another medieval age full of innovations but low standards of living is real."