[welanes]

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.

[pmontra]

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.