“At this stage, proposals on how to implement a robot tax in practice remain very nebulous,” she says. “Legislators are likely to deal with the complexity of defining what constitutes a ‘robot’ and how to tax it. The distinction between a machine and a robot or between a computer program and AI is still not clear.”

Considering that virtually all industries are going to become AI powered to one degree or another in the near future, perhaps it would be more straightforward to demand a proportion of shares of any publicly traded company, and some equivalent for the larger non publicly traded companies, and distribute dividends directly.