Contents
- Is it such a distant prospect?
- Replacing people with machines is not such an unusual situation.
- Unconditional Solution – Unconditional Basic Income?
- Lawyers at Risk
- Since AI works so efficiently and quickly, will it replace “live” professionals?
- Finally, the last question is who will be responsible for the robot’s mistakes?
The prospect of ubiquitous robotization and the loss of work because of this seems like a distant forecast of futurologists. And in vain: soon the boss will be able to replace you with a program that performs the same tasks for less money. And don’t pay taxes
According to the forecasts of the World Economic Forum, about 75 million people could lose their seats in a couple of years. The Forrester survey also found that in 2019, almost half of enterprises increased spending on soft robots (typically used to automate routine operations), and two-thirds planned to do so during 2020. Already now there are fully automated production complexes – for example, robots in the production of the Japanese company FANUC can “work” without human supervision for as long as 30 days.
Think about the tax on cars need now. Otherwise, employment and tax revenues will be threatened, and the burden on the budget will increase, as social benefits will have to be paid and programs for retraining citizens will have to be created, many lawyers, economists, businessmen and politicians believe.
Is it such a distant prospect?
The introduction of such a tax was predicted back in 2018 by Bill Gates. “The idea is that you can tax capital or labor. The robot is capital. […] Over time, we are likely to have various deductions and subsidies to increase the demand for ordinary employees, as people want to stimulate job creation,” the billionaire told the Nikkei newspaper.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio also proposed a tax on robots for large companies that are cutting jobs through automation and cannot provide adequate replacements during his 2019 presidential campaign.
In July 2020, the issue was also raised in our country: according to Izvestia, the Institute for Progressive Education suggested that the Ministry of Finance introduce an “income” tax on robots, and direct the collected funds to a specially created structure – the Fund for the Retraining of Vulnerable Professions. It is assumed that tax deductions will be comparable to 13% personal income tax from the average salary in a particular profession.
Replacing people with machines is not such an unusual situation.
According to The Wall Street Journal, one of the burning questions on the agenda is whether this time is something special. Machines have been destroying jobs for hundreds of years. But at the same time, new ones appear, and the next step is up to the state, which should provide training and assistance to workers. In addition, changing the tax system could harm innovation and slow down automation, which can improve living standards and employment in the long run. This, in particular, was mentioned in 2017 in the decision of the European Parliament, which opposed the introduction of such a tax.
Another problem is that the taxation of robots, first of all, will require a definition of what robots are in general. “Will it include, for example, machine tools?” asks The New York Times columnist Eduardo Porter. Wouldn’t inaccuracy in the definitions create loopholes for possible tax evasion?
Unconditional Solution – Unconditional Basic Income?
A solution to the problem of job losses for a large number of people could be an unconditional basic income. So, for example, says the Israeli historian and futurist Yuval Noah Harari. “We can not assign value to people based on their work or expenses in stores – someone will turn out to be an incredibly valuable member of society as a good neighbor, a good parent or friend, even if he does not have any work in the traditional sense of the word,” he said. earlier in the interview.
Li Kaifu, a Chinese-Taiwanese venture capitalist and founder of the Sinovation Ventures venture fund, disagrees: people who have lost their jobs due to automation certainly need help so that they can “start over”, but the idea of uXNUMXbuXNUMXba basic income is an overly simplistic solution to an important issue. Problems.
“If you just give the unemployed some amount of money, where is the guarantee that he will spend it on retraining, and not on alcohol or gambling? That is why assistance should be targeted and very thoughtful: you need to understand which specialties will be the most stable, and offer people to retrain for them, ”he said.
Despite arguments from opponents of robot tax regulation, calls for it continue to surface in the UK, US, Japan and Canada, and South Korea, the world’s most robotic country, introduced a semblance of a tax on robots in 2018, cutting tax breaks on companies’ investment in automation. .
Lawyers at Risk
You can also look at the situation from another angle: can robots actually replace the lawyers themselves and independently create an ideal, fair taxation system for everyone?
Pepeliaev Group partner, PhD in Law, Master of Cognitive Sciences Maria Nikonova discusses this topic:
The development of robotics and artificial intelligence provokes three main questions:
All three issues are related, among other things, to the sphere of taxation.
Only the first question can be answered with certainty. AI systems are already helping to calculate taxes, find errors in calculations, and predict the outcome of a dispute.
I recall the story of how, during the duel between LawGeex AI and lawyers, the first one proved that it can work with the same accuracy and professionalism as highly qualified specialists. After reviewing non-disclosure agreements, the program showed a level of accuracy higher than 20 lawyers, and spent only 26 seconds on it, compared to 92 minutes, which, on average, it took competitors to analyze.
Even now, legaltech companies are developing and implementing technologies that solve specific problems. For example, AI can analyze and organize tax liabilities related to wages. There are examples of projects that, on the basis of documents and data, allocate expenses that are taken into account for tax purposes. So-called predictive technologies are also being developed, which make it possible to evaluate a specific court case, compare it with an array of judicial practice, assess the likelihood of its positive resolution in court, and even explain what is the reason for such an assessment.
Tax authorities are also introducing AI into their work, which allows them to be more accurate in calculating tax liabilities. One of the artificial intelligence solutions implemented by the Federal Tax Service in our country is the Taxik robot, which answers 300 of the most popular questions in the Taxpayer’s Cabinet.
Speaking of the latest AI solutions in the field of taxes, I would like to mention the AI developed and introduced to the market this year by Salesforce. AI can think through and create an ideal fair tax system. As conceived by the creators, AI will help legislators in different countries to assess how fair their taxes are.
AI can find errors in contracts, analyze documents and find meaningful information in them, process legislation and pay attention to any discrepancy between the wording of laws and primary documents, communicate and respond to requests. And due to machine learning, AI is able to process arrays of information, create algorithms and improve them.
Since AI works so efficiently and quickly, will it replace “live” professionals?
Consulting firms, for example, have calculated what percentage of lawyers’ paid hours could be replaced by robots. According to some estimates, this is only 13%, which means that approximately the same number of specialists will be released on the labor market. According to other estimates, this is 23% of paid hours. If we talk about the labor market as a whole, then according to McKinsey, 30% of professions will be automated by 2030, which will leave 14% of the population worldwide without work.
Such forecasts also provoke talk about various fiscal measures that will prevent the widespread dismissal of people and their replacement by robots. Thus, many experts believe that in our country, in one form or another, a tax on artificial intelligence technologies will be introduced. The funds raised will be used to train and retrain laid-off workers.
Whether the impact of the introduction of AI will be so dramatic that it will require economic and fiscal measures, only time will tell.
The following version looks more true: the development of robotics will not leave people without work, but will only require partial reprofiling, because new areas will appear that are in dire need of specialists – for example, professionals in the field of creating and managing AI. This is what the state should do first of all — to create opportunities for training professionals of a new level and thinking.
If we talk about the fiscal burden on AI, then so far our state is interested in AI developing, and even creates tax preferences for companies in the field of information technology – for example, as part of a tax maneuver for IT companies, income tax for them was reduced state up to 3%, and insurance premiums up to 7,6%.
Finally, the last question is who will be responsible for the robot’s mistakes?
For example, the AI system made a calculation error and the company underpaid tax as a result. In this case, the defaulting company will be held liable. But in this case, can the affected company recover the fine paid from its counterparty, which developed and supplied it with a solution that made a mistake? Can the fact that the mistake was made by AI be considered as a circumstance mitigating tax liability?
These are the questions that need to be resolved in the near future.
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