7 ms·

The idea of a 'robot tax' is gaining steam

36 points by elorant 7y ago

dyeje 7y ago
I'm surprised by the reaction here. It seems fairly intuitive to me. People used to capture part of the value creation with their wages and they are being replaced by robots. That value that used to circulate in the economy now just goes to owners (wealthiest section of society) instead of circulating. This just takes that same value back. I don't know the best way to implement it, but I think it is necessary if you want to prevent wealth inequality from getting worse, faster over time.
- paulpauper 7y ago
  Because robots are not taking the jobs away. Some of the wealthiest, biggest companies in the world have more employees than ever in spite of having the the most resources to invest in automation. Successful businesses tend to add people, not replace them. What automation does is allow people to be more productive but that is not the same as replacing people.
  - vinniejames 7y ago
    Exactly this. Until robots can entirely replace humans, there will still be the need for humans to do certain jobs. As robots become commoditized, companies will start to compete purely on the pieces that can't be automated, ie the human element and increase demand for human workers
    - pdimitar 7y ago
      All true, only those people will be probably 1000x less than all working people currently, due to highly specialised and manual and creative skills that not everyone would (or could) acquire. So this still doesn't seem to address the problem of a huge portion of humanity being displaced and left to live under a bridge.
- the-dude 7y ago
  There are a lot of robots in agriculture for some time now ( just naming 2 : the tractor and the milking machine ). What is different now?
  - robotron 7y ago
    Scale and artificial intelligence.
    - the-dude 7y ago
      The scale of the automation/robotization of agri has been humongous. And broad application of AI is nowhere near.
- ZeroGravitas 7y ago
  Generally, the most efficient thing to tax is the thing you don't want. What you are proposing is a good thing (greater efficiency) with a negative side effect (tilting economies towards the rich) but rather than tax the bad thing, you're taxing the good thing in order to reduce its negative side effect. For whatever reason it seems like taxing robots is more socially acceptable than taxing the wealthy.
  - keymone 7y ago
    You really don’t want a couple million unemployed and unemployable citizens at your doorstep one day angry for why they suddenly can’t afford to live. You don’t want it as a government and you don’t want it as a company/corporation.
    - mirimir 7y ago
      Back in the 60s, there was the joke that it'd be less expensive to just bribe the Vietnamese instead of fighting them.
      - pharke 7y ago
        Instead of dropping bombs they should have just dropped cigarettes, whiskey, magazines, food, clothing and a variety of American consumer goods.
  - pdimitar 7y ago
    > For whatever reason it seems like taxing robots is more socially acceptable than taxing the wealthy. But these two often overlap. If any actual revolutionising automation by robots is coming, only the wealthiest corporations/people can and will afford it. As your parent poster said, robot tax is just trying to make sure that they won't hold on to their money under the mattress until the end of time. Redistribution of wealth is critically important.
- ghostpepper 7y ago
  I think there are at least two errors with your reasoning: one is that people don’t have inherent (economic) value that is captured by working for wages. If a robot does my job, why would I feel entitled to capture any value? The second is the idea that the owners are less likely to circulate money in the economy than the employees. There’s no value to the owner in sitting on that money, so why would they?
  - dyeje 7y ago
    First, it's not that they are 'entitled' to the value, it's that our entire economic model is based on continuous consumption. If vast swathes of the population have no way to get money because robots do the work and only the wealthiest capture the value, then it collapses because there is nobody with money to consume the goods produced. Second, the point you're getting at is trickle down economics. Personally, I don't think it works.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- goldcd 7y ago
  That's not quite true. If you took a single production line and replaced the workers with robots - then yes. Those workers have lost their jobs. However if there was a second hypothetical production line that made a product that was now economically viable (or just cheaper) by partially automating it, then that's made more manual jobs available (maybe the line didn't exist before, or now as the product is cheaper, there can be two lines). So you've still got people working - and you've now also got cheaper/new stuff for them to buy. Watch making is a good example. Wherever you are on the planet, you can afford a watch - something that used to require incredible wealth. This is due to new tech and automation. Doesn't mean that nobody's handcrafting cogs with little files, just means that those watches are now only being bought by the wealthy.
  - pdimitar 7y ago
    In the current economical climate that seems to tilt more and more towards huge inequality (which is already a fact, mind you, it's just tilting even more in the same direction) I think we cannot afford to simply cross our fingers saying "oh well, maybe new jobs will magically appear". Yes it happened in the past, sure. That's not guaranteeing it will happen again this time around though.
    - goldcd 7y ago
      It'll all work out overall - that's the defining concept of the system. Whether it'll work out for individuals though - well the system doesn't care (and that again is a defining concept)
mdorazio 7y ago
A robot tax is the most ridiculously luddite political action I can think of. How about instead of taxing technological progress we fix the tax system so it actually profits and wealth accumulation.
- alpineidyll3 7y ago
  The only way I can make sense of this is that the robots provide a surrogate buffer for the wealthy to feel "less attacked". Sadly wealthy people are not interested in the greatness of their planet or society anymore. Somehow they think their private enterprises that serve ads are making society great or leaving a legacy.
- rriepe 7y ago
  It's another everything tax. They just thought up a new word for it.
Ericson2314 7y ago
And doom us to low wage low productivity feudalism. No thanks.
- Angostura 7y ago
  Surely doom us to a life where the robots do the work and we lead interesting lives of leisure
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    > and we lead interesting lives of leisure We'd like to think this, and maybe some would do "interesting" things, but the fact is that most people turn into couch potatoes. People who retire early tend to die early; stop working and so will your body.
    - anon9001 7y ago
      > but the fact is that most people turn into couch potatoes > stop working and so will your body Citation badly needed here. I can tell you that before my peers joined the workforce, everyone was part of sports and clubs and community activities. After they joined the workforce, that stuff largely dropped away, because work is too time consuming.
      - big_chungus 7y ago
        > Citation badly needed here Fair enough. https://www.nber.org/papers/w24127 https://www.nber.org/papers/w24127 https://jech.bmj.com/content/70/9/917.full https://jech.bmj.com/content/70/9/917.full https://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c6089 https://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c6089
        anon9001 7y ago
        Well, sure, if you consider 55 as early retirement, I could see how people would be ready to check out and do nothing. These are people that have likely worked full time for the last 30+ years. What I want to know is what happens at scale if people retire at 30 or 40, or maybe if they never work at all. The idea is that automation might free up people from work entirely. I don't think it's fair to extrapolate data from people who have been working for 30+ years and then had an "early" retirement.
sdfin 7y ago
Would a washing machine count as a robot?
- sokoloff 7y ago
  Depending on how defined, it could easily include: a self-service elevator, 3D printers, CNC mills and lathes, a farm combine, automobile service lifts, farm irrigation, power tools, construction equipment, pneumatic tools, power screwdrivers, a dishwasher, an automated telephone exchange, internal combustion engines [or even steam engines for that matter], intermodal container systems, an IVR, spreadsheets, word processors, microwave ovens, lawn mowers, leaf blowers, hedge trimmers, automated boilers, sous vide circulators, any web-based order lookup system, automated parcel sortation machines, possibly all of e-commerce... It seems insane to me that we’d seek to tax productivity improvements in order to encourage maximizing the amount of human labor required to accomplish a given outcome. “Spoons Not Shovels!” https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/
- paulpauper 7y ago
  |It is a terrible idea. I dunno how someone who is considered smart like bill gates would endorse it.
retrac 7y ago
A robot is just another part of capital. Why not just tax capital directly?
- maxharris 7y ago
  But how will that avoid the problem of slowing down the future by sapping investment into it? I know it's a little more complicated than "more money means more X", but that actually is the premise behind every cancer and AIDS walk out there.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  I'm sure many people would prefer to. But making policy in a democratic society requires compromise. If it's easier to reach a consensus that this particular kind of capital needs to be taxed, it might make sense to just enact that tax and worry about other kinds of capital later.
- big_chungus 7y ago
  Because there's a profoundly negative impact on investment and economic growth. Maybe the 99% don't see as much direct impact from said growth, but it stopping would still hurt them greatly. As an aside, what you're describing is not a tax. There's neither a transaction nor any exchange of good or service involved. It's a direct confiscation of wealth, currently unconstitutional, and I'd call it theft. It's not skimming off the top of a transaction, it's literally the feds reaching into your pocket and calling that money theirs because enough other people said it was okay. It doesn't magically become not theft because the thief has a badge or a "democratic mandate" (enough others saying that yes, they do indeed want your money).
  - retrac 7y ago
    I'm not sure that the argument about disincentive is any different from taxing income. We want to encourage both wealth and income, and taxing them does discourage them. But the fact that taxing income discourages people from getting income isn't a strong argument against income taxation altogether. I'm not American, so the unconstitutional argument doesn't mean much to me. But doesn't the USA have property taxation for land? Wouldn't your arguments apply to the property tax in most states? It's nothing more than the government saying you owe money because you own wealth (in the form of land). Are property taxes theft? Unconstitutional?
maxharris 7y ago
What are the goals here? Is it to maximize the production of the stuff of our lives so that it is available at the highest quality and lowest price possible, requiring the least amount of human toil? (It helps to think about where shoes, houses, food, entertainment, clothing, medicine and all the rest comes from.) Or is the goal to inhibit change, so that people don't have to apply their minds to figure out how and where they fit into a rapidly changing (improving?) world? Let's leave aside issues of class and envy, because I think that's a related, but secondary issue that is (at least in part) resolved by the answer to the above.
- carapace 7y ago
  > What are the goals here? That's really the important thing to nail down, eh? Wendell Berry has a essay titled "What are People For?" (As an aside, while looking for a good link, i came across a site advertising "BUY CHEAP ESSAY Fast & Safe Academic Writing Service" expletive-deleted what a world.) Anyhoo... the answers to "what to do about rampant automation" fall out naturally once you settle the fundamental issue. FWIW, YMMV.
- mmcconnell1618 7y ago
  One of the big goals is to provide time for workers to either retire or retrain for different careers. Right now, a company can buy a robot (capital expense that they depreciate) and the worker is out of job with the possibility of a little severance pay and some unemployment for a short time. A tax that targeted jobs that have been automated away could be used to fund retraining programs and help those displaced workers find new careers.
  - maxharris 7y ago
    Why not go the other way and encourage changes in society that reduce the cost of living? For example, here in California there is a severe housing shortage, and it is widely agreed that the difference between us cheaper places are the restrictions placed by our own laws. Supply is therefore artificially limited. This is on my mind because I am unemployed and living off of my savings. I don't want to be told what to do all day, and I don't want handouts either. I just want to have the option of going my own way, and to get a square deal on the things I buy.
michaelbuckbee 7y ago
An interesting aspect of this is that the definition of both "robot" and "automated" is terrifically fluid. There are all sorts of productivity advancing tools that tread the line. If I told you I'd built a machine that halved the number of people/time that it took to unload a truck full of boxes you might think that it pretty clearly would fall under this but take a look at the device: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzxiXYJqLn4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzxiXYJqLn4 I'm still pitching Buckbee's law: "A robot's utility is inversely proportional to how much it looks like a robot." and in practice, I think you'd find that almost every real gain in productivity doesn't actually look like a "robot".
carapace 7y ago
> a so-called "robot tax" faces significant hurdles in design and implementation. To put it mildly. I want to make litter-bots: Imagine a ladybug about the size of half a beachball. It crawls around and collects litter. It's mostly autonomous, but to really do a good job it needs a minder, a human "oracle" for navigation and trash?y/N queries, etc. (The minders do not necessarily have to be physically nearby to the 'bots.) ML advancements have drastically reduced the amount of human oversight needed but not eliminated it entirely. In that context, what should the economic relationship be between the minders, the clients, and the robot factory? (Consider that the robot factory is likely very automated, a robot robot-factory.) FWIW, I had originally thought I would set up a kind of volunteer distributed remote workforce with a UI that folks would play like a game. Another possibility would be to sell or lease 'bots to operators, who are then responsible for finding their own contracts. The litter-bots would be akin to landscaper's tools (like an AI leaf-blower or chainsaw.) "Let the robots do the work and we'll take their pay." I do NOT think it would be useful to for the government to tax my litter-bot-company's robots and then somehow redistribute that to... whom, exactly? I am in favor of Universal Basic Income, but only when the robots are good enough to seriously impact the average person's ability to compete in the job market and get work. (Like, me. If I wasn't good at computers I'd probably be homeless!) A given economic regime must provide jobs or bread or "you're gonna have a bad time." I think we're at the tipping point: the hardware is COTS (Common Off-The-Shelf) the software is coming together nicely. There are already robot vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers that work pretty well, etc. So, yeah, what's the economic program for the automation revolution? Lords and serfs? Or some sort of Marxist distributed ownership of the "means of production"? (Probably not: even the communists didn't actually go through with that in the end, eh?) Why is Daiso so much more popular than RepRaps?
- pdimitar 7y ago
  > I do NOT think it would be useful to for the government to tax my litter-bot-company's robots and then somehow redistribute that to... whom, exactly? As much as I think a robot tax looks to be one of very few possible ways to improve current situation, I also agree with you that the whole thing isn't well-explained or argued for. It does sound like this: "government vacuums even more money but 10 years later, people still live under bridges or in slums". Sadly, knowing the average politician's thought process, the odds of us ending with an economic inequality shifted from corporations to governments is extremely likely. We the people are greedy no matter what positions we occupy... > "Let the robots do the work and we'll take their pay." I like that a lot, actually. It's a much better idea. Robot goes to work in my name sake, I get money wired in my account and I get the final say in what does the robot do and when. The reliability of the transaction hinges on economical interest (I want the robot to work with a stable schedule N hours a day because that makes me money). Really neat idea.
flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago
I imagine this will be circumvented in similar novel ways much like the UK's window tax [0] was centuries ago. Multiple robots will be attached to one robot "brain" and argued that they are all the same robot. Or perhaps they will go the Volkswagen route and lie to government regulators. Whenever the government bot taxers walk in the room, all of the bots stop moving and act like smart compacting garbage cans. Or perhaps costs of robots will dwindle so much that they will become disposable. Come bot check day, the majority of the workforce will be unrepairable and destined for the bin. Or perhaps they're making high end CPUs with high margins that sell for $500 apiece, but the government thinks you're making plastic bags with low margins that sell for $500/pallet. This will never work imho... or rather, it will never be "fair". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax
- csunbird 7y ago
  > At that time, many people in Britain opposed income tax, on principle, because the disclosure of personal income represented an unacceptable governmental intrusion into private matters, and a potential threat to personal liberty.[3] In fact the first permanent British income tax was not introduced until 1842, and the issue remained intensely controversial well into the 20th century.[4] Oh, how times has changed...
Waterluvian 7y ago
We need this. And computer tax. And car tax. And refrigerator tax. But not just a one off tax. A recurring tax to capture all the efficiency and job loss the horse and buggy industry , secretaries, ice delivery industry, etc. have incurred.
mirimir 7y ago
Maybe fund guaranteed minimum income with taxes on automation.

36 points by elorant 7y ago

I'm surprised by the reaction here. It seems fairly intuitive to me. People used to capture part of the value creation with their wages and they are being replaced by robots. That value that used to circulate in the economy now just goes to owners (wealthiest section of society) instead of circulating. This just takes that same value back. I don't know the best way to implement it, but I think it is necessary if you want to prevent wealth inequality from getting worse, faster over time.

paulpauper 7y ago
Because robots are not taking the jobs away. Some of the wealthiest, biggest companies in the world have more employees than ever in spite of having the the most resources to invest in automation. Successful businesses tend to add people, not replace them. What automation does is allow people to be more productive but that is not the same as replacing people.
- vinniejames 7y ago
  Exactly this. Until robots can entirely replace humans, there will still be the need for humans to do certain jobs. As robots become commoditized, companies will start to compete purely on the pieces that can't be automated, ie the human element and increase demand for human workers
  - pdimitar 7y ago
    All true, only those people will be probably 1000x less than all working people currently, due to highly specialised and manual and creative skills that not everyone would (or could) acquire. So this still doesn't seem to address the problem of a huge portion of humanity being displaced and left to live under a bridge.
the-dude 7y ago
There are a lot of robots in agriculture for some time now ( just naming 2 : the tractor and the milking machine ). What is different now?
- robotron 7y ago
  Scale and artificial intelligence.
  - the-dude 7y ago
    The scale of the automation/robotization of agri has been humongous. And broad application of AI is nowhere near.
ZeroGravitas 7y ago
Generally, the most efficient thing to tax is the thing you don't want. What you are proposing is a good thing (greater efficiency) with a negative side effect (tilting economies towards the rich) but rather than tax the bad thing, you're taxing the good thing in order to reduce its negative side effect. For whatever reason it seems like taxing robots is more socially acceptable than taxing the wealthy.
- keymone 7y ago
  You really don’t want a couple million unemployed and unemployable citizens at your doorstep one day angry for why they suddenly can’t afford to live. You don’t want it as a government and you don’t want it as a company/corporation.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    Back in the 60s, there was the joke that it'd be less expensive to just bribe the Vietnamese instead of fighting them.
    - pharke 7y ago
      Instead of dropping bombs they should have just dropped cigarettes, whiskey, magazines, food, clothing and a variety of American consumer goods.
- pdimitar 7y ago
  > For whatever reason it seems like taxing robots is more socially acceptable than taxing the wealthy. But these two often overlap. If any actual revolutionising automation by robots is coming, only the wealthiest corporations/people can and will afford it. As your parent poster said, robot tax is just trying to make sure that they won't hold on to their money under the mattress until the end of time. Redistribution of wealth is critically important.
ghostpepper 7y ago
I think there are at least two errors with your reasoning: one is that people don’t have inherent (economic) value that is captured by working for wages. If a robot does my job, why would I feel entitled to capture any value? The second is the idea that the owners are less likely to circulate money in the economy than the employees. There’s no value to the owner in sitting on that money, so why would they?
- dyeje 7y ago
  First, it's not that they are 'entitled' to the value, it's that our entire economic model is based on continuous consumption. If vast swathes of the population have no way to get money because robots do the work and only the wealthiest capture the value, then it collapses because there is nobody with money to consume the goods produced. Second, the point you're getting at is trickle down economics. Personally, I don't think it works.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
goldcd 7y ago
That's not quite true. If you took a single production line and replaced the workers with robots - then yes. Those workers have lost their jobs. However if there was a second hypothetical production line that made a product that was now economically viable (or just cheaper) by partially automating it, then that's made more manual jobs available (maybe the line didn't exist before, or now as the product is cheaper, there can be two lines). So you've still got people working - and you've now also got cheaper/new stuff for them to buy. Watch making is a good example. Wherever you are on the planet, you can afford a watch - something that used to require incredible wealth. This is due to new tech and automation. Doesn't mean that nobody's handcrafting cogs with little files, just means that those watches are now only being bought by the wealthy.
- pdimitar 7y ago
  In the current economical climate that seems to tilt more and more towards huge inequality (which is already a fact, mind you, it's just tilting even more in the same direction) I think we cannot afford to simply cross our fingers saying "oh well, maybe new jobs will magically appear". Yes it happened in the past, sure. That's not guaranteeing it will happen again this time around though.
  - goldcd 7y ago
    It'll all work out overall - that's the defining concept of the system. Whether it'll work out for individuals though - well the system doesn't care (and that again is a defining concept)

mdorazio 7y ago

A robot tax is the most ridiculously luddite political action I can think of. How about instead of taxing technological progress we fix the tax system so it actually profits and wealth accumulation.

alpineidyll3 7y ago
The only way I can make sense of this is that the robots provide a surrogate buffer for the wealthy to feel "less attacked". Sadly wealthy people are not interested in the greatness of their planet or society anymore. Somehow they think their private enterprises that serve ads are making society great or leaving a legacy.
rriepe 7y ago
It's another everything tax. They just thought up a new word for it.

Ericson2314 7y ago

And doom us to low wage low productivity feudalism. No thanks.

Angostura 7y ago
Surely doom us to a life where the robots do the work and we lead interesting lives of leisure
- big_chungus 7y ago
  > and we lead interesting lives of leisure We'd like to think this, and maybe some would do "interesting" things, but the fact is that most people turn into couch potatoes. People who retire early tend to die early; stop working and so will your body.
  - anon9001 7y ago
    > but the fact is that most people turn into couch potatoes > stop working and so will your body Citation badly needed here. I can tell you that before my peers joined the workforce, everyone was part of sports and clubs and community activities. After they joined the workforce, that stuff largely dropped away, because work is too time consuming.
    - big_chungus 7y ago
      > Citation badly needed here Fair enough. https://www.nber.org/papers/w24127 https://www.nber.org/papers/w24127 https://jech.bmj.com/content/70/9/917.full https://jech.bmj.com/content/70/9/917.full https://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c6089 https://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c6089
      - anon9001 7y ago
        Well, sure, if you consider 55 as early retirement, I could see how people would be ready to check out and do nothing. These are people that have likely worked full time for the last 30+ years. What I want to know is what happens at scale if people retire at 30 or 40, or maybe if they never work at all. The idea is that automation might free up people from work entirely. I don't think it's fair to extrapolate data from people who have been working for 30+ years and then had an "early" retirement.

sdfin 7y ago

Would a washing machine count as a robot?

sokoloff 7y ago
Depending on how defined, it could easily include: a self-service elevator, 3D printers, CNC mills and lathes, a farm combine, automobile service lifts, farm irrigation, power tools, construction equipment, pneumatic tools, power screwdrivers, a dishwasher, an automated telephone exchange, internal combustion engines [or even steam engines for that matter], intermodal container systems, an IVR, spreadsheets, word processors, microwave ovens, lawn mowers, leaf blowers, hedge trimmers, automated boilers, sous vide circulators, any web-based order lookup system, automated parcel sortation machines, possibly all of e-commerce... It seems insane to me that we’d seek to tax productivity improvements in order to encourage maximizing the amount of human labor required to accomplish a given outcome. “Spoons Not Shovels!” https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/
paulpauper 7y ago
|It is a terrible idea. I dunno how someone who is considered smart like bill gates would endorse it.

retrac 7y ago

A robot is just another part of capital. Why not just tax capital directly?

maxharris 7y ago
But how will that avoid the problem of slowing down the future by sapping investment into it? I know it's a little more complicated than "more money means more X", but that actually is the premise behind every cancer and AIDS walk out there.
SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
I'm sure many people would prefer to. But making policy in a democratic society requires compromise. If it's easier to reach a consensus that this particular kind of capital needs to be taxed, it might make sense to just enact that tax and worry about other kinds of capital later.
big_chungus 7y ago
Because there's a profoundly negative impact on investment and economic growth. Maybe the 99% don't see as much direct impact from said growth, but it stopping would still hurt them greatly. As an aside, what you're describing is not a tax. There's neither a transaction nor any exchange of good or service involved. It's a direct confiscation of wealth, currently unconstitutional, and I'd call it theft. It's not skimming off the top of a transaction, it's literally the feds reaching into your pocket and calling that money theirs because enough other people said it was okay. It doesn't magically become not theft because the thief has a badge or a "democratic mandate" (enough others saying that yes, they do indeed want your money).
- retrac 7y ago
  I'm not sure that the argument about disincentive is any different from taxing income. We want to encourage both wealth and income, and taxing them does discourage them. But the fact that taxing income discourages people from getting income isn't a strong argument against income taxation altogether. I'm not American, so the unconstitutional argument doesn't mean much to me. But doesn't the USA have property taxation for land? Wouldn't your arguments apply to the property tax in most states? It's nothing more than the government saying you owe money because you own wealth (in the form of land). Are property taxes theft? Unconstitutional?

maxharris 7y ago

What are the goals here? Is it to maximize the production of the stuff of our lives so that it is available at the highest quality and lowest price possible, requiring the least amount of human toil? (It helps to think about where shoes, houses, food, entertainment, clothing, medicine and all the rest comes from.) Or is the goal to inhibit change, so that people don't have to apply their minds to figure out how and where they fit into a rapidly changing (improving?) world? Let's leave aside issues of class and envy, because I think that's a related, but secondary issue that is (at least in part) resolved by the answer to the above.

carapace 7y ago
> What are the goals here? That's really the important thing to nail down, eh? Wendell Berry has a essay titled "What are People For?" (As an aside, while looking for a good link, i came across a site advertising "BUY CHEAP ESSAY Fast & Safe Academic Writing Service" expletive-deleted what a world.) Anyhoo... the answers to "what to do about rampant automation" fall out naturally once you settle the fundamental issue. FWIW, YMMV.
mmcconnell1618 7y ago
One of the big goals is to provide time for workers to either retire or retrain for different careers. Right now, a company can buy a robot (capital expense that they depreciate) and the worker is out of job with the possibility of a little severance pay and some unemployment for a short time. A tax that targeted jobs that have been automated away could be used to fund retraining programs and help those displaced workers find new careers.
- maxharris 7y ago
  Why not go the other way and encourage changes in society that reduce the cost of living? For example, here in California there is a severe housing shortage, and it is widely agreed that the difference between us cheaper places are the restrictions placed by our own laws. Supply is therefore artificially limited. This is on my mind because I am unemployed and living off of my savings. I don't want to be told what to do all day, and I don't want handouts either. I just want to have the option of going my own way, and to get a square deal on the things I buy.

michaelbuckbee 7y ago

An interesting aspect of this is that the definition of both "robot" and "automated" is terrifically fluid. There are all sorts of productivity advancing tools that tread the line. If I told you I'd built a machine that halved the number of people/time that it took to unload a truck full of boxes you might think that it pretty clearly would fall under this but take a look at the device: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzxiXYJqLn4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzxiXYJqLn4 I'm still pitching Buckbee's law: "A robot's utility is inversely proportional to how much it looks like a robot." and in practice, I think you'd find that almost every real gain in productivity doesn't actually look like a "robot".

carapace 7y ago

> a so-called "robot tax" faces significant hurdles in design and implementation. To put it mildly. I want to make litter-bots: Imagine a ladybug about the size of half a beachball. It crawls around and collects litter. It's mostly autonomous, but to really do a good job it needs a minder, a human "oracle" for navigation and trash?y/N queries, etc. (The minders do not necessarily have to be physically nearby to the 'bots.) ML advancements have drastically reduced the amount of human oversight needed but not eliminated it entirely. In that context, what should the economic relationship be between the minders, the clients, and the robot factory? (Consider that the robot factory is likely very automated, a robot robot-factory.) FWIW, I had originally thought I would set up a kind of volunteer distributed remote workforce with a UI that folks would play like a game. Another possibility would be to sell or lease 'bots to operators, who are then responsible for finding their own contracts. The litter-bots would be akin to landscaper's tools (like an AI leaf-blower or chainsaw.) "Let the robots do the work and we'll take their pay." I do NOT think it would be useful to for the government to tax my litter-bot-company's robots and then somehow redistribute that to... whom, exactly? I am in favor of Universal Basic Income, but only when the robots are good enough to seriously impact the average person's ability to compete in the job market and get work. (Like, me. If I wasn't good at computers I'd probably be homeless!) A given economic regime must provide jobs or bread or "you're gonna have a bad time." I think we're at the tipping point: the hardware is COTS (Common Off-The-Shelf) the software is coming together nicely. There are already robot vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers that work pretty well, etc. So, yeah, what's the economic program for the automation revolution? Lords and serfs? Or some sort of Marxist distributed ownership of the "means of production"? (Probably not: even the communists didn't actually go through with that in the end, eh?) Why is Daiso so much more popular than RepRaps?

pdimitar 7y ago
> I do NOT think it would be useful to for the government to tax my litter-bot-company's robots and then somehow redistribute that to... whom, exactly? As much as I think a robot tax looks to be one of very few possible ways to improve current situation, I also agree with you that the whole thing isn't well-explained or argued for. It does sound like this: "government vacuums even more money but 10 years later, people still live under bridges or in slums". Sadly, knowing the average politician's thought process, the odds of us ending with an economic inequality shifted from corporations to governments is extremely likely. We the people are greedy no matter what positions we occupy... > "Let the robots do the work and we'll take their pay." I like that a lot, actually. It's a much better idea. Robot goes to work in my name sake, I get money wired in my account and I get the final say in what does the robot do and when. The reliability of the transaction hinges on economical interest (I want the robot to work with a stable schedule N hours a day because that makes me money). Really neat idea.

flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago

I imagine this will be circumvented in similar novel ways much like the UK's window tax [0] was centuries ago. Multiple robots will be attached to one robot "brain" and argued that they are all the same robot. Or perhaps they will go the Volkswagen route and lie to government regulators. Whenever the government bot taxers walk in the room, all of the bots stop moving and act like smart compacting garbage cans. Or perhaps costs of robots will dwindle so much that they will become disposable. Come bot check day, the majority of the workforce will be unrepairable and destined for the bin. Or perhaps they're making high end CPUs with high margins that sell for $500 apiece, but the government thinks you're making plastic bags with low margins that sell for $500/pallet. This will never work imho... or rather, it will never be "fair". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax

csunbird 7y ago
> At that time, many people in Britain opposed income tax, on principle, because the disclosure of personal income represented an unacceptable governmental intrusion into private matters, and a potential threat to personal liberty.[3] In fact the first permanent British income tax was not introduced until 1842, and the issue remained intensely controversial well into the 20th century.[4] Oh, how times has changed...

Waterluvian 7y ago

We need this. And computer tax. And car tax. And refrigerator tax. But not just a one off tax. A recurring tax to capture all the efficiency and job loss the horse and buggy industry , secretaries, ice delivery industry, etc. have incurred.

mirimir 7y ago

Maybe fund guaranteed minimum income with taxes on automation.