Governments should tax automation technologies proportionally to the number of jobs they displace and fund worker retraining.

This debate hinged on a fundamental tension between theoretical desirability and administrative feasibility. Through Rounds 1 and 2, the sides remained neck-and-neck: Pro established a compelling normative framework regarding tax code biases favoring capital over labor, while Con effectively flagged measurement concerns without yet demonstrating their fatal nature. The turning point arrived in Round 3, where Con crystallized the "attribution problem"—the insurmountable gap between aggregate econometric estimates of job displacement and the granular, causal attribution required for firm-level taxation. Pro's response relied heavily on Frey and Osborne's occupational exposure methodology, but failed to bridge the critical leap from correlation (automation correlates with displacement) to causation (this specific robot caused this specific job loss). This logical lacunae—an ecological fallacy in reverse—crippled Pro's implementation mechanism.

Round 4 cemented Con's advantage. While Pro retreated to moral arguments about "socializing costs while privatizing gains," Con demonstrated that the proposed tax would create perverse incentives: firms would avoid measurable automation (taxable) in favor of opaque process improvements (untaxed), or simply relocate capital to jurisdictions without such taxes. Con's alternative—general progressive taxation with robust transition support—emerged as the more coherent policy framework, avoiding the deadweight loss of targeted taxation while achieving the distributional goals Pro sought.

The decisive factor was evidentiary burden. Pro needed to prove that automation's displacement effects were isolatable, measurable, and taxable without creating distortionary avoidance behaviors. They provided robust evidence that automation causes displacement in aggregate, but never overcame Con's challenge regarding the impossibility of constructing a legal, non-gameable definition of "automation displacement" at the firm level. Con successfully shifted the burden back to Pro, showing that the tax base itself was epistemologically unstable.