[2][3] The idea of taxing companies for deploying robots is controversial with opponents arguing that such measures will stifle innovation and impede the economic growth that technology has consistently brought in the past.
In 2017, San Francisco supervisor Jane Kim made these strategies the subject of a task force, stating that income disparity attributable to robots is widely visible in her district.
While crediting Andrew Yang for drawing attention to the issue, de Blasio stated that he had different policy goals and proposed making large corporations responsible for five years of income tax from jobs that are automated away.
[13] Tax law professor Xavier Oberson has called for robots to be tax-compliant so that government spending can continue even as the pool of taxable income for human workers decreases.
Economist Yanis Varoufakis has discussed the additional complication of determining how much a human worker would have hypothetically made in a labour sector that has been dominated by robots for decades.
[22] EU Commissioner Andrus Ansip rejected the idea of a robot tax, stating that any jurisdiction implementing one would become less competitive as technological companies are incentivized to move elsewhere.