It appears the main motivation here is to maintain the same level of taxation on a business that switches from human to robot workers for a significant part of the labour undertaken.
What's the reason to single out robots and not other means of production / capital though? There's no real distinction between a robot and a drilling machine, car, accounting software or anything that improves productivity.
You raise a good question. In most cases there's a person manning that drilling machine, driving that car, or typing into that piece of software.
This draft legislation anticipates a secular change in the labour market whereby autonomous robots displace the need for humans so significantly that the pool of taxable labour vanishes for good.
Meanwhile economic output increases but there's no taxation system in place for the government to take a slice. So shift the tax burden to the robots.
It's far from perfect but sure as hell somebody (or something) is getting taxed.
There is VAT. If the output really increases then VAT's output increases too. However, of nobody works who's going to pay that VAT? We'll see how it will play out.
This proposal reminds me of world of Time of EVE, an anime with truly electronic persons. It's all on YouTube.
its like, your business shouldn't be too dependent on the local government, just like it shouldn't be too dependent on 1 employee, or one copy of data. that's why some businesses negotiate with the government before expanding into a new area.
One problem with this is that one human is a pretty constant unit of work in a way that one robot isn't. What if one robot can do the work of 1000 humans? Or what if a very cheap robot does 1/100 of a human's work? Under this system it sounds like they would be taxed the same way.
What happens when the robots organize labor unions?
Will this "electronic person' be allowed to vote for representation?
Will they be entitled to medical care (I can't help but think of the Wizard of Oz's Tin Man getting his joints oiled...)
At which point you might as well just buy out the business and establish proper collective ownership over a "business" that now consists of a few people operating a lot of robots.