The German Minister of Digital wants to tax AI to finance the retraining of employees

Tax AI to finance its consequences on employment. In an interview given this Tuesday, October 13 to the daily Tagesspiegel, the German Minister of Digital Transformation, Karsten Wildberger, opened the door to taxing the activity of artificial intelligence companies, in order to finance retraining and compensate for the job destruction that it will cause.

“The extremely high turnover generated by this technology, we must tax it, and with this money, we can finance the transformation,” declared the conservative minister, ensuring that he shared the “approach” of Bill Gates, supporter of a tax on robots to slow down the rush towards automation and finance professional retraining programs. “To be able to finance this transformation of the labor market and retraining, we need growth and we must be open to other instruments,” he argued.

Also read Taxing robots and AI to save our social model: should we make machines contribute instead of employees?

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However, the plan for such a tax is not imminent. Before reaping the benefits, Karsten Wildberger insists on the need to support the “growth” of the sector, while Europe is struggling to keep up with the United States and China. “We must innovate to catch up,” he assures, before spinning out the metaphor: “Imagine that the automobile has just been invented and that we are already regulating traffic that does not yet exist, thus making its construction more difficult. What I mean: let’s build the car first.”

If the minister sees dependence on foreign powers as “the greatest risk we run in terms of advanced technology”, he on the other hand rules out the scenario of a cutoff of American digital services by the Trump administration, in the event that relations with Europe worsen. “Why would they do that? We are one of the main partners of the Americans and an attractive market. I do not see this scenario, because it would massively destroy confidence in American technology companies, and therefore their economic model,” he said.