Why We Need a Robot Tax: Making AI Pay Its Way

Jeremy Kahn shares 5 key insights from Mastering AI: A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future.

A lot of ink has been spelled on the question of whether AI is friend or foe. But the real question may be how we can integrate this disruptive technology into our economy without destroying millions of human jobs. The moment calls for creative thinking, like that of Jeremy Kahn, author of the new book Mastering AI: A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future. Jeremy is an award-winning journalist for Fortune magazine and writes the weekly newsletter Eye on AI. In his book, he argues that a “robot tax” would disincentivize mass layoffs and that artificial intelligence will have its most positive impact on education and medicine. Here he is to share more of his big ideas.

1. AI will not lead to mass unemployment.

One of the most common misconceptions about AI is that it will lead to mass unemployment. This is not true—at least not anytime soon. While AI has become more capable, it cannot do all the tasks that constitute most people’s work. AI can help us do a lot of things, but it needs human supervision. We will mostly use these tools as professional assistants—copilots rather than autopilots.

For most knowledge workers—accountants, lawyers, doctors, marketing executives, software developers, consultants, architects, and analysts—demand for their collective services outstrips supply. This supply constraint is one reason people in these professions can charge so much for their labor. But as a result, many individuals and companies (small businesses in particular) cannot access these services because of their high cost.

AI changes this equation by making existing knowledge workers more productive and allowing workers who don’t have the formal qualifications or experience to work as software coders, lawyers, or accountants to take on at least some of the work these professionals perform. Increasing the supply of people who can perform these tasks should lower the cost of these services. That’s good for the economy. By allowing these less skilled, less formally educated workers to take on professional tasks, this group of people who have been increasingly squeezed out of the middle class (forced to work in lesser-paid jobs in retail or hospitality) get the chance to lift themselves back into it. That, too, is good for the economy.