Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is open to ideas about how to share the massive wealth being generated by the AI boom. He’s created billionaires on his executive team, personally ensures his staff are competitively paid, and is “perfectly fine” with proposals to tax the ultra-wealthy more.
But he disagrees with a proposal from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to tax robots and AI tokens.
Gates resurfaced his suggestion in an essay this week, writing: “Right now, if you’re an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings. But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense. The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines.”
The entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist also suggested that governments will need the funds. Gates figures that if AI takes the jobs of humans, then state revenues from income tax will drop.
“A tax would slow the rush away from human labor a little and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net,” Gates explained.
Huang disagrees. In an interview with Fox Business’s The Claman Countdown, the chipmaker boss said: “I love the heck out of Bill … but I don’t see what he sees. I see something very, very different. And so my remedies will be a little different.”
Huang added: “I’m in favor of taxes. And I think that … for anybody who is productive, it’s a great way for us to contribute back to society and the economy. But the fact of the matter is, there are probably lots of different ways to approach this.”
Gates—a self-professed AI optimist—had a markedly more cautious tone in his latest op-ed. He wrote that while AI promises huge boons (such as improving access to medicine and education and streamlining bureaucracy), it also poses huge threats that world leaders aren’t ready for. These risks include ‘stunted’ child development, emboldened criminals, and vanishing jobs for Gen Z.
Huang’s perspective is more positive. He said that while “of course” the nature of jobs would change—as his already has—”I believe … that this will be a net job creator. However, there are going to be many jobs that will be disrupted and so we have to be sensible about that. We have to be sensitive about that and be supportive of that.”
While Gates suggests that companies could be incentivized to replace humans with robots because of existing fiscal policy, Huang says the historical precedent disagrees: “When companies are more productive, they don’t lay off people, they hire more people. The reason for that is because companies have ambitions … and I would say the vast majority of the world’s companies … have ambitions for growth.
“When they’re more productive, when they’re more profitable, [it] allows us to invest more and go after more growth. Nonetheless, overall, this is going to be a net job creator at a scale that we have never seen.”
A bid for reindustrialization
Huang has previously suggested that skilled, blue-collar workers stand to gain significantly from the AI boom. Trades like plumbers and electricians, Huang has said, will be in high demand as data centers are built across the globe.
Speaking this week, the 63-year-old tech titan suggested that the new economic era would be one of reindustrialization.
He explained: “We have lots and lots of white-collar workers, but we’re also going to have a lot of skilled labor. And having a large population of skilled labor and people who build things and make things with their hands is tremendous for the United States. We want to reindustrialize the United States. We want to create more jobs. And all of that’s going to happen right now as we speak with A.I.”