The Globe and Mail reports in its Monday edition that in a widely publicized recent interview with American political commentator and journalist Ezra Klein, tech billionaire Bill Gates revisited an idea he has long heralded as a solution to the threat of automation on jobs: a robot tax. The Globe's Vanmala Subramaniam writes that specifically, Mr. Gates argues that as artificial intelligence becomes more embedded in white-collar workplaces, robot workers should be required to contribute to payroll taxes to deter businesses from replacing human employees entirely. Mr. Gates said that taxing AI or robots would ultimately ensure continued revenue for the government when human jobs are replaced en masse. The idea of a tax solution to the threat of mass job upheaval by AI has previously surfaced in certain academic and tech circles; Mr. Gates first called for it in 2017. Jim Stanford, an economist and director of the Vancouver-based Centre for Future Work, said the greater threat of job losses comes from the growing AI bubble, and the trillions of dollars in capital that hyperscalers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta are investing in computing and data centres with borrowed money. He prefers taxing AI billionaires.