Korea urged to introduce robot tax

By Yoon Sung-won

Future technologies represented by artificial intelligence (AI) are already expanding their influence on people's lives.

From Google DeepMind's AlphaGo series systems to IBM's Watson system, AI and robotic technologies are already around us. The former overwhelmed human go masters, including Korea's Lee Se-dol and China's Ke Jie, while the latter penetrated into meetings of surgeons to offer calculated medical suggestions.

Expectations are mixed over the influence of such new technologies on the job market. Whereas many workers worry about being replaced by automated machines with artificial intelligence, U.S. market tracker Gartner said otherwise.

In its projection of the near future after 2018, Gartner said the introduction of AI technologies at workplaces will decrease the number of jobs around the globe between 2015 and 2019 but will start to create more jobs in 2020 than it had destroyed.

In this context, experts here urged that Korea should start taking a closer look into the introduction of "robot tax" and use the national income to retrain human resources for new jobs.

As a strong advocate of the concept of robot tax, Lee Kwang-hyung, professor of bioengineering and brain engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), said the government should launch discussion on the new tax on a positive perspective of the future.

"Though there is positive projection of the future, I think those who research the introduction of AIs and related policies should stand on the negative side. Only then we can really prepare for the days to come," Lee said.

The professor said both robots and those who generate profit using the robots can be subject to the taxation, hinting that this may compensate for the decreased tax revenue, which is caused as AI systems and robots replace human workers.

Lee, however, warned that the policymakers should be cautious about when to actually introduce the robot tax and on what type of robots to levy the tax.

"Obviously it will be better to put the tax on simple automated systems such as unmanned bank window systems and automatic parking lot switch systems first to minimize public backlash," he said.

"A more pressing concern is that the introduction of robot tax may undermine growth of AI and robot industries here. For this reason, the government should act prudent on the robot tax and learn from the success and failure in overseas countries. What it immediately needs to do is to start public discussions on the robot tax."

Lee also said the government's recent move to downsize the tax deduction benefits on enterprises because their investment in automation could be a first step to introduce the robot tax.

Agreeing with Lee, Choi Pae-kun, an economics professor at Konkuk University, also said Korea is in urgent need to start open discussions on the robot tax.

"As of 2015, Korea has 533 automated systems for every 10,000 workers, which is the highest in the world.

Considering that the number goes down to about 400 in other countries with advanced industrial automation systems, Korea has been very quick to adopt robots at workplaces," Choi said. "In particular, Korea's manufacturing industry is currently led by semiconductors, which are mostly produced by robots."

According to Choi, introduction of robots at work boosts productivity while reducing jobs. Along with a low wage hike rate in general, this will expand low quality jobs that will undermine consumption, leading to "chaos" in the market in the near future.

"Many tax law experts around the world argue that robots should be considered a part of corporate assets and the amount of robot tax should increase as the robots generate more profit for the enterprises," he said.

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