The looming prospect of human jobs getting quickly replaced by robots and other automated processes has spurred a wide range of potential solutions, from a universal basic income to retraining.

Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates has another idea: Tax the bots.

In an interview with Quartz, Gates said such a robot tax would pay for creation of the remaining jobs that still require humans, such as working with special needs children or taking care of the sick or elderly. There has been much speculation as to what jobs go first, and what will follow, but work consisting of social interaction that requires empathy that automation can’t supply outside of science fiction.

However, jobs will go, said Gates, especially in areas such as driving, finance and factory work. When that happens, Gates said, “you can’t just give up that income tax, because that’s part of how you’ve been funding that level of human workers.”

Exactly how we make up the missing tax revenue, Gates says, is something we need to start talking about: “Some of it can come on the profits that are generated by the labor-saving efficiency there. Some of it can come directly in some type of robot tax.”

Earlier this month European lawmakers called for more regulations set by the European Union regarding the “rise of the robots” — how robots are developed, for what purposes and how they’ll be deployed. The same lawmakers actually rejected a proposal to implement a robot tax, something the International Federation of Robotics said would “stunt innovation” as well as negatively affect competition.

Gates, in fact, sees nothing wrong with slowing down automation, saying that we will “cross the threshold of job replacement of certain activities all sort of at once.” People need to be replaced, he said, not displaced.

No small number of people have noted the irony in Gates’ call for a tax on automation, since Microsoft’s software presumably has improved productivity immensely in nearly every company. And “productivity,” however desirable, is still another way of saying that some jobs have been eliminated thanks to technology that requires fewer secretaries, typists, number-crunchers and myriad other jobs. Other critics said the tax could stunt innovation.

Similar to one of his contemporaries, Tesla Motors Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk, Gates believes the mass dispossession of human jobs could be cataclysmic if governments have not prepared for the transition and its social and economic aftereffects.

“It is really bad if people overall have more fear about what innovation is going to do than they have enthusiasm,” Gates concluded, reiterating that more automation should mean more resources where humans are needed most.

Photo credit: Duncan Hull via Flickr