Bill Gates: The Robot That Takes Your Job Should Pay Taxes (qz.com)

In a recent interview with Quartz, Bill Gates said he believes that governments should tax companies that use robots who are taking human jobs, as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of automation and to fund other types of employment. The money gained from taxing robots could then be used to finance jobs taking care of elderly people or working with kids in schools -- jobs which humans are particularly well suited for. Quartz reports: [Gates] argues that governments must oversee such programs rather than relying on businesses, in order to redirect the jobs to help people with lower incomes. The idea is not totally theoretical: EU lawmakers considered a proposal to tax robot owners to pay for training for workers who lose their jobs, though on Feb. 16 the legislators ultimately rejected it. "You ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed" of automation, Gates argues. That's because the technology and business cases for replacing humans in a wide range of jobs are arriving simultaneously, and it's important to be able to manage that displacement. "You cross the threshold of job replacement of certain activities all sort of at once," Gates says, citing warehouse work and driving as some of the job categories that in the next 20 years will have robots doing them. You can watch Gates' remarks in a video here, or read the transcript embedded in Quartz' report.

Comments

that's it. the end game.

[turkeydance]

only death is left for humans in the inevitable.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds fine. The robot's salary is $0. 25% tax of $0 is $0.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[Gussington]

only death is left for humans in the inevitable.

The only thing that is inevitable is prophets of doom every time a technology article is released.
Had you explained life in 2017 to someone from 1840, it would be unbelievable. And a person from 1840 might not be able to live in 2017 successfully doesn't mean that there aren't still billions of humans doing just that today. So to analyse the prophet of doom a bit further, what you really mean is, a person with a brought up in 2017 would probably find life in 2087 a gap too far to bridge. But that doesn't mean humans in 2087 won't find whatever world they're living in as normal (and likely enjoying a higher standard of living)

Re:that's it. the end game.

[quenda]

Had you explained life in 2017 to someone from 1840, it would be unbelievable.

You'd have to start by explaining a lot of new words that did not exist then. Like "unemployment".

Re:that's it. the end game.

[mysidia]

The government should impute the wages that a human worker would be paid in 2010 with a Human cost-of-living adjustment based on the Robot's job description, For a given amount of Company revenue by industry.

Then Double the quantity

And compare the Wages the Company is currently paying every month to the Imputed Wages based on the greater of the Total number of robots Jobs, and based on the Company's total revenue and Industry.

Make the companies Pay standard Employee Taxes on the difference between the Imputed Sum and the Actually paid sum, Including what the Social security, Medicare, Income Tax, and Healthcare benefits would be; Require the company actually buy in Health insurance for the robots.

Then make the companies pay an Additional supplement to Income Tax witholding for the robots called the "Automation tax".

Basically, double the income tax rate for automated employees to 60%, after already having doubled the wage, And specify the "Minimum wage" for the lowest jobs for purposes of imputing automated job roles to $20/Hour.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[Kjella]

You'd have to start by explaining a lot of new words that did not exist then. Like "unemployment".

Only because working for somebody else was not the norm. You had workers, homesteaders and vagrants. Obviously if you worked on your own land, trade or craft you were what we'd today call self-employed. Those who didn't were drifters taking stray jobs, when they weren't employed they were just called much less civilized things than unemployed.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[JoeMerchant]

I would say he's asking for a corporate profits tax - as robots increase profitability, corporations should pay increased taxes on that profitability.

Now, we just have to shred all the corporate tax loopholes and get them to start paying some taxes in the first place.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[Applehu Akbar]

"You'd have to start by explaining a lot of new words that did not exist then. Like "unemployment"."

William Wordsworth, the Lake poet who lived in rural Cumbria, described rural unemployment and vagrancy as being common in his time - the early nineteenth century, in the heart of the Industrial Revolution:
http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww...
and: http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww...

This student thesis describes, albeit crudely, Wordsworth's social milieu: https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/ttu-ir/...
A time of dislocation as technology obsoleted a range of traditional jobs, just as it is doing now.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[quenda]

People seem to be confusing the early 19th C with the Great Depression of the 20th.

Around here, Australia, there was a chronic labour shortage in those days. And I believe it was similar in the US:

The U.S. economy of the early 19th century was characterized by labor shortages, as noted by numerous contemporary observers. The labor shortage was attributed to the cheapness of land and the high returns on agriculture. All types of labor were in high demand, especially unskilled labor and experienced factory workers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And that was before workers started fleeing to the gold rushes.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[ChrisMaple]

I don't go to the doctor in the last 5 years, because I have too much work to do.

You don't need a doctor. You need a logician and a cunning linguist.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[Attila Dimedici]

You started out pretty well, then came this

History has told a story of increasingly decentralized governments, only to have them replaced by increasingly centralized corporate empires.

When, in fact, history tells a story of increasingly centralized governments promoting (and being promoted by) increasingly centralized business empires. This process continues until some disruptive force comes along with which the centralized authority is unable to cope. In all cases power becomes ever more centralized until such a time as the information necessary to maintain that centralized power exceeds the ability of the organization centralizing power to process it. There are three things areas in which an organization may centralize beyond its ability to process information:

1. Communication--primarily speed of communication, but not necessarily just speed

2. When the organization is unable to communicate information well enough and fast enough to and from the central decision makers, central authority collapses

3. Data collection

4. When the data necessary to make adequate decisions exceeds the ability of the central authority to gather and store it, the central authority collapses.

5. Data processing

6. When the amount of data necessary to make adequate decisions exceed the ability of the central authority to process it, the central authority collapses.

Technology has eliminated the problem of speed of communication as a limiting factor on centralized control. I have my doubts about the possibility of overcoming the other communication limits (once the number of people in an organization exceeds some number it appears that words begin to mean different things to different, not clearly defined, groups of people, even when they, theoretically, share the same language). Technology has, at least theoretically, overcome the limit on the ability to gather and store the data necessary to make adequate decisions over the world. However, while technology has massively increased human ability to process the data necessary to manage large centralized organizations, there appear to be emergent qualities to ever larger organizations which cause them to suddenly, and without warning, have different requirements for what data needs to be processed.
Basically, my point is that power tends to become more and more centralized until the organization centralizing the power is no longer manageable. Usually, the people in charge continue to attempt to consolidate ever more power while this is happening until something catastrophic occurs. Occasionally, a visionary has arisen who manages to decentralize authority sufficiently to allow the organization to continue to thrive (or to divide into multiple subgroups which thrive) for some time after the initial singularity.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[OrangeTide]

Instead of an income tax, it could be an operate tax. $0.10 per hour of operation. So little that manufactures might agree to it, but since you'd likely want to operate your robots around the clock that's about $16/week. Not enough to support any poor old ladies, but these sorts of social programs aren't usually setup to depend on a single source of tax revenue.

That said, if I had a business and money to spend on lobbyist I wouldn't let the government place taxes on using my own property.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[davester666]

No, they'll wind up being leased instead of purchased. Manufacturers will demand payments forever instead of just one-time lump sum payments.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

What about value-added tax in places where it exists? Surely the unpaid robots create added value in course of their operation.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[dougdonovan]

agreed, the robot that the windows operating system's possibly helped build ( no research done, no proof, i'm just assuming, don't go there but i know Someone will because they have nothing better to do) that takes your job should pay taxs. ok bill, help pay the robots taxs. better yet, the robot that takes my job can pay my taxs for life and not just the robot tax for itself.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[Greystripe]

I think it's the cat pictures they'd have a problem with, insulting people has been an acceptable pastime for thousands of years. Generally the only differences have been on who you are allowed to insult.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[roman_mir]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's do that, let's just so that. I want to see all of these attempts at stealing from fully automated businesses, I have morbid type of curiosity, which makes me wonder and muse about all the ways that company owners will find and use to get around all this collectivist theft. It is always interesting to observe arms races, this is probably the ultimate arms race: those who want to steal vs those who produce. It is fascinating.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[Antique Geekmeister]

> Only because working for somebody else was not the norm

While it may not have been the norm, it was certainly common. Apprentices at a craft, or journeyman, worked for the masters of their craft. Children worked for their parents. Guards worked for local landowners or nobility, and anyone who sold goods or services worked for their clients. Standing armies were far more rare, but existed, and merceneries also had employees. Out of work mercenaries were also a very _dangerous_ unemployment problem.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[aurizon]

Well the robot Robdoo does the work of 100 men, and AMRU (Autonomous Machines and Robots Union) feels that a reasonable salary would be 100 times the human's wage to properly compensate Robdoo. In addition, Robdoo requires Rest, Adjustment and Maintenance time (RAM) equal to 2 times the operating time. Any operation that impinges on RAM shall be paid as overtime at 150 times the human rate (time and a half). Robdoo is also a member of the ROBOGOD congregation and attends etheric communions of service, and any impingement on this religious communions shall be paid at double time (200 x human rate). AMRU officers shall be allowed online access to Robdoo to make sure that technical improvements that might increase hiz productivity by X rate, and properly salary adjusted....

Re:that's it. the end game.

[golden_hands]

Very insightful post. I wish I had mod points to mod this up..

Re:that's it. the end game.

[RandyHill]

Every time someone invents a way to make things cheaper and faster we should heavily tax it, until we are back in the dark ages.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[RandyHill]

No we should just shred all corporate income taxes, to stop taxing investment/capital. Corporate income taxes are the dumbest, most self destructive taxes a country can impose and the US has some of the highest rates (over 40% with average state taxes). Corporate income is capital for new investments, it's also the reward for making investments. Our entire corporate income tax system is a massive disincentive to investing capital in the US, which is why trillions of profits of foreign subsidiaries are trapped overseas.

"Closing loopholes" is just code for making US companies entirely uncompetitive with foreign firms that have much better tax systems.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[religionofpeas]

Now, we just have to shred all the corporate tax loopholes and get them to start paying some taxes in the first place.

Which will just send them over the border to a country with more loopholes.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[mysidia]

We will not see a 1-1 conversion of employee to robot. We never have.

What we see is the introduction of a software application, or of a machine, that requires humans to operate and maintain.

Right.... one bot can potentially replace hundreds of people.

There's nothing that says the task of operating and repairing machines cannot be automated, and the pace of technological development is very high lately.

machine allows the business to expand. But when the business expands, it does not need to hire more people, it can just make better use of the people it has.

That works for SMBs, But larger businesses conduct mass-layoffs which are catastrophic to the public, when their requirement for human workers decreases.
It is not because of Machines that business expands; business would expand as long as there is an increase in customers willing to pay the price the business can sell at. It's because of increased volume of demand from consumers, and business owners are incentivized to expand their businesses, because they will earn more money per quarter with a larger business.

The expansion of businesses is attributed to a number of things, But mostly Population growth.
If a Business does Not expand or increase number of employees, then Relative to the economy, and because of Inflation, that business is actually shrinking.

That isn't a trick to work around your proposal, that is how automation has been progressing for centuries.

It's not reasonable to expect automation of past centuries to show what automation in the future will look like.

Shall we apply your proposal to farmers who use tractors to let one worker do the work of 100? What about those same farmers using Excel to reduce a whole team of accountants down to just one? What about the huge trucks used to ship goods to shopping centers, eliminating whole teams of horse-and-carriage drivers?

A key difference is these developments were in isolation. The pace of further automations was very low, and only a small fraction of the economy was impacted at the time. That is not the case with new automations coming out in this decade, which will probably be able to cut most human jobs to near zero across all industries.

The public has already taken the negative Fallout that came with these automations, and we're now enjoying the benefits.
Around the time the tractor was being introduced, It maybe could have been a net public good To slow the pace at which farmers could be replaced, But the time to propose that Already arrived and passed a Long long time ago.

What about the huge trucks used to ship goods to shopping centers, eliminating whole teams of horse-and-carriage drivers?

Why don't you ask the Horses how they would feel about it. Because that is the role the Humans are going to be placed in now..... Not the role of the Drivers (Who could find other work), but the Role of the Horses.

The actual ramification coming is that Human work will be largely obsoleted, and Human hands will likely have their economic value reduced to 0, while 100% of the Cake gets re-assigned to people who own Real property and Raw materials which robots can do work on for basically free.

Instead, we should embrace the fact that we can automate our burdensome labor away, dive into that head first (as we are doing anyway), and figure out how to provide for the teeming masses of people who can't find work. This isn't a problem we can escape by slowing the adoption of labor automation

Why not slow it down, until our culture is ready to handle it, And people can figure out what to do with their lives, if they are no longer able to do Valuable work, and Not able to Improve the world, or Change the world, or make some small contribution to something of meaning, with their Mind or their Hands?

Essentially the future direction of automation appears to be that 99% of Humans will eventually get forced into retirement at a very young age, And they'll be destitute with the Robot managers and the Government owning all the money.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[Gussington]

I sincerely believe that future historians will consider this a second Dark Age dominated by economic power, just one with much better tech toys than the first one dominated by religious authority. Just because the masters profess a different doctrine and the priesthood wears tailored suits instead of collars doesn't make it much different, in the end.

We can't read the future, but the general pattern is that society improves over time. So it follows that future generations will look back at us with some disdain.
Popular opinion might think things were better in 'the good old days', but the data says otherwise, and so this will continue.

I really do believe that if these UFOs really are alien spacecraft, it's no mystery they don't openly land. They'd monitor our telecommunications and observe us, and they would all agree on one thing: "They're clearly not ready - all they care about is controlling each other. How primitive they are."

The idea that an advanced species would have to get within a few hundred metres of the earth's surface to monitor it is completely absurd. Also being advanced they would already be very familiar with animal behaviour so can't imagine anything would be a surprise. Nothing humans do is any different to any other species, just like a lab rat, if the intellectual gap is too great then we would serve no purpose to another species other than to experiment on.
I know some people like to think humans are somehow different, or special in the universe, but in the grand scheme on things all life is the same, doing whatever we have to to survive.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[pabloesgalhardo]

How about this: A robot can work 24 hours a day, a human 8 Each one of us at 18 yo is given a robot, this robot will provide for us, this robot is insured so its maintained and replaced whenever needed. The company gets 24 hours shifts The human gets paid without having to work in the area his robot does his job so the human can create art, new technologies, do nothing but still buy things as usual. The robot works. Everybody is happy and the capitalism is saved again. ;) Easy isnt it?

Re:that's it. the end game.

[soc_cost_priv_gains]

Isn't that what tariffs are for? To neutralize that foreign advantage?

Re:that's it. the end game.

[lsatenstein]

The government should impute the wages that a human worker would be paid in 2010 with a Human cost-of-living adjustment based on the Robot's job description, For a given amount of Company revenue by industry.

Then Double the quantity

And compare the Wages the Company is currently paying every month to the Imputed Wages based on the greater of the Total number of robots Jobs, and based on the Company's total revenue and Industry.

Make the companies Pay standard Employee Taxes on the difference between the Imputed Sum and the Actually paid sum, Including what the Social security, Medicare, Income Tax, and Healthcare benefits would be; Require the company actually buy in Health insurance for the robots.

Then make the companies pay an Additional supplement to Income Tax witholding for the robots called the "Automation tax".

Basically, double the income tax rate for automated employees to 60%, after already having doubled the wage, And specify the "Minimum wage" for the lowest jobs for purposes of imputing automated job roles to $20/Hour.

My PACEMAKER IS A ROBOT. What should it or me be taxed?

Re:that's it. the end game.

[mysidia]

My PACEMAKER IS A ROBOT. What should it or me be taxed?

Robots which provide only personal health or other benefits to a natural person owning or leasing use of the robot not taxed.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[pabloesgalhardo]

The introduction of AI at large scale in the workplace is something that never happened, were really in the verge of a new revolution. What amazes me is that almost no one see this as a positive thing that it could be. This has the potential to be a tremendously confusing factor in labour relations and in the way societies have evolver, market economy and so on. BUT this also has the potential to free us from work, specially repetitive low paid work. Let us be the robot masters, lets create a simple system to allow each one of us to profit from one, two, ten robots... Lets make these robots a new asset like a new copier machine, like a new workshop tool. Wake up people, lets demand mankind over robots policies, we can be artists, creators, we can be businessmen managing our robot fleets, we can lend our robots to others to exploit. The same thing slave masters did 200 years ago we now have the opportunity to do but with machines, no one will get hurt! Think about it, your robots working for you 24/7 you could be traveling spend the day by the pool, learn to play guitar, paint, make new robots, make babies... Whake up people!

Re:that's it. the end game.

[RespekMyAthorati]

BUT this also has the potential to free us from work, specially repetitive low paid work.

And at the same time, free us from having food to eat or a roof over our head.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[JoeMerchant]

We should shred corporate taxes on income that is reinvested in a reasonable timeframe.

Corporate income that gets banked to the level of tens of billions of dollars for upwards of a decade is completely detrimental to the economy as a whole.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[RandyHill]

Well, it's not being spent on private jet rides and ferraris. It's in banks being loaned out to companies, so that's beneficial too.

And lots of cases where companies have huge sums tucked away are because they are off-shore profits, if they bring those home they'd lose around 40% to taxes (depending upon their home state). If we eliminated corporate income tax you'd never see that, trillions of overseas dollars would be repatriated instantly, some reinvested, and most dividended to shareholders. If we made dividends just ordinary income taxed at taxed at regular income rates in exchange for eliminating corporate income taxes the government probably wouldn't lose that much in income taxes, and the system would much more favor investing in the US.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[RandyHill]

Tariffs are only a sneaky way to tax US consumers to make political insiders rich. There is no "foreign advantage" all trade is a two way street. Every dollar we spend overseas comes back either as purchases of goods, services or investment.

Re:that's it. the end game.

[RockDoctor]

f I actually wanted any of the extra benefits like medical. I don't go to the doctor in the last 5 years, because I have too much work to do.

At least one person in this exchange doesn't understand the meaning of "insurance", and I spent a year at college doing Statistics with second highest exam results for the year.

Which is understandable, I suppose, if you have "free at the point of use" healthcare which is paid for through general taxation ; you may mistake the medical premiums as being "payment for the doctor", while in fact they're a fixed fee for there being a doctor (hospital, MRI, oncologist, whatever) to call. You know how your car insurance covers claims over a certain amount (the "excess", in our terminology ; yours may differ, but the concept will be there) ; well your medical insurance does similarly, but with a more complex list of exclusions.

The Cxx that took my job should pay taxes

[Snotnose]

My company got merged, I got redundant, and the handful of Cxxx's involved got huge bonuses? Um no, those Cxx's need to pay tax on my lost income.

When your goal is to reduce headcount, you should have to pay for it.

Re:The Cxx that took my job should pay taxes

[FlyHelicopters]

When your goal is to reduce headcount, you should have to pay for it.

People who say this are morons...

If you make it expensive to fire people or lay them off (like they do in parts of Europe), then people are very reluctant to hire in the first place...

Companies will then do anything they can to avoid hiring anyone extra to start with...

Re:The Cxx that took my job should pay taxes

[JoeMerchant]

When your goal is to reduce headcount, you should have to pay for it.

People who say this are morons...

If you make it expensive to fire people or lay them off (like they do in parts of Europe), then people are very reluctant to hire in the first place...

Companies will then do anything they can to avoid hiring anyone extra to start with...

Because they're so generous with their hiring today? When corporations are hiring full-time benefit positions with 6 weeks of vacation, maternity leave, and decent healthcare, I'll start believing that they have a good working system... who has these things today, Europe, or the USA?

Re:The Cxx that took my job should pay taxes

[Zontar The Mindless]

I live and work in Europe. Give me a minute, I'm sure I can guess the answer.

Re:The Cxx that took my job should pay taxes

[virtig01]

Generous with compensation != generous with hiring

It's true, the average American worker doesn't get as much vacation time as a European worker. Still, half of American workers don't use all of their vacation days as it is. But pay is higher. Perhaps American workers just value cash compensation over other benefits.

On the hiring front (which is the topic IIRC), hiring climate is substantially better in the US. Hiring/firing is easier, and labor mobility is higher. The unemployment rate is more volatile, but also historically lower.

Re:The Cxx that took my job should pay taxes

[drinkypoo]

If you make it expensive to fire people or lay them off (like they do in parts of Europe), then people are very reluctant to hire in the first place...
Companies will then do anything they can to avoid hiring anyone extra to start with...

It's just another reason for UBI. Then you can do away with the minimum wage. It's also a great reason for national health. Then employers don't need to deal with employee contributions, either. And with a graduated tax scheme for corporations as well as individuals, small business can get a break even with a simplified tax code.

Simplify, reduce, streamline. UBI.

Re:The Cxx that took my job should pay taxes

[AmiMoJo]

American workers need more money because there are fewer public services, particularly healthcare.

European workers have more stability and rights. That leads to overall higher levels of freedom. Even unemployment isn't as bad, because the benefits and assistance are better.

Basically I'm the US you might be lucky and do better from that system, but overall it is on average worse. And of course Americans don't believe in luck anyway, success is entirely due to character and will.

Re:The Cxx that took my job should pay taxes

[kaur]

Perhaps American workers just value cash compensation over other benefits.

American workers are saving off for their kid's education and their own medical costs. Europeans just don't need to do that.

I worked for a large corporation with headquaters in US and branches everywhere. The Americans got paid a lot more - a LOT more. Their social insecurity was still showing off. Especially in family matters.

People getting 10x my salary stated "we cannot afford a second child". In my country, getting a child is a no-cost affair. All medical expenses are paid, a parent gets 1.5 years fully paid leave, education from kindergarten to university is free, etc. Even if you are unemployed, the state will cover your medical insurance and the child's basic needs.

What good are your "cash benefits" if you cannot have children???

Re:The Cxx that took my job should pay taxes

[RandyHill]

So I can't create a job without a massively expensive set of benefits and commitments? Ok, I'm not hiring then.

What's our unemployment rate again?

Re:The Cxx that took my job should pay taxes

[Cacadril]

I mostly second this. But please stop confirming, even if only initially and partially, the idiocy of the fairness argument. If anyone earning $10^7 thinks it is "unfair" to pay 70% taxes on that income, he is wellcome to switch position and start flipping burgers instead.

An income of $10^7 is only possible through working the society. Leveraging the rules, taking advantage of empowering circumstances in society. You don't do that working your farm on an isolated island. But society is there for everybody, not just for the 1%. Burger flippers are poorly paid, not because it is fair, but because burger flippers have little leverage and little power. It is not a matter of protecting the human rights of the 1% to keep it that way. Using the voting rights and electing politicians that tax the wealth, is a reasonable way we burger flippers and other 99%ers can wield our power against the powers of the 1%.

Re:The Cxx that took my job should pay taxes

[thinkwaitfast]

You aren't working 250 times as hard as someone in The DRC.

Re:The Cxx that took my job should pay taxes

[Hognoxious]

None of them is a statistician, then?

Re:The Cxx that took my job should pay taxes

[JoeMerchant]

I call BS on "US pay is higher" - anytime I've looked to move overseas, the pay was equivocal. Of course, "The US" is large and diverse, and I am comparing Florida pay to Germany or Auckland NZ. Houston pay is indeed higher than Florida, but so are their cancer rates.

Re:The Cxx that took my job should pay taxes

[JoeMerchant]

Not only healthcare and education, but also retirement - US Social Security sucks, as does the perpetual message that it may bankrupt at any time.

Re:The Cxx that took my job should pay taxes

[JoeMerchant]

Exactly - so many champions of the free market point to lottery winners as justification for their policy ideas.

Re:The Cxx that took my job should pay taxes

[JoeMerchant]

One less asshole in the hiring market does not make employment worse for the employed.

If there's a need for the products or services, another employer will spring up and fill the gap. If the new employer doesn't manage his people like a petulant child tyrant, so much the better.

Re:The Cxx that took my job should pay taxes

[RandyHill]

Understand that all benefits and payroll taxes come out of the employee's wages. Mandating them just means employees will make less in cash income, without ever giving them the choice.

Personally at my startup I have to strongly consider paying my early employees under the table. I had one employee a couple years ago, paid him legally and it ended up creating a ton of work filing various tax forms and withholdings every quarter, and getting called by the state because they didn't get my statement even though I sent them my statement it was the wrong statement, etc. All time I couldn't spend finding customers to keep the business going.

Does That Include Software?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that include WYSIWYG word processing software that put all those typesetters out of work? Bill, you owe some back taxes.

Re:Does That Include Software?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its funny he wants to tax robots, shift the focus away from taxing the richest 1% like himself.

Hes even conveniently left his own automation out of the taxation.

Re:Does That Include Software?

[thoughtlover]

Does that include WYSIWYG word processing software that put all those typesetters out of work? Bill, you owe some back taxes.

If that were the case, Gutenberg owes some backtaxes for all the scribes he put out of business.

Re: Does That Include Software?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, Elon Musk wasn't born in the US, sooo... he can't become president.

Re:Does That Include Software?

[TeknoHog]

Maybe, but it's hugely offset by the number of tech support jobs necessary to maintain Bill's software.

In fact, I'm thinking of making robots that break windows. Think of all the new jobs they will create!

Re:Does That Include Software?

[CanadianMacFan]

Considering the amount of time I lost fighting with Word I think Bill would be getting a refund.

I miss WordPerfect.

What a load...

[fustakrakich]

Exactly the reverse should happen. Prices have to be driven down. Nobody is going to pay the tax but us.

Re:What a load...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, corporations are people.
THEY will pay the tax.

You are now free to vomit.

Re:What a load...

[amiga3D]

And place the tax in the cost of what they sell and then when you buy it you'll pay the tax.

Re:What a load...

[thesupraman]

You realise that cost of production and cost of sale are almost totally unrelated now, and have been for some time, right?

Look at engineering tools.
A set of good (cobalt steel) drills ex-china (and yes, they are genuine, identical to local) sell for around 20% of the local cost, and that is delivered..

However the same is true everywhere.

The reason you pay 'Prices' is to support the corporate cash stockpiles, and therefore share values. Deal with it.

Re:What a load...

[JoeMerchant]

Prices are, and have been, whatever the market will bear. Very few prices are driven down globally by competition - retailers like WalMart will jack up prices 2x and more (same good, different prices in stores less than 20 miles apart) when they can get away with it, because of captive markets, or markets that don't comparison shop, etc.

Price competition is real, but it's not nearly as ubiquitous as "free market" champions think it is.

Re:What a load...

[psmoot]

No, corporations are people.

A nit but corporations are groups of people with all the rights and responsibilities of those individuals. We only treat them as "a person" as legal shorthand.

THEY will pay the tax.

The employees, customers, and/or investors will pay the tax. Corporations just collect the tax. Ultimately all taxes are paid by people.

Re:What a load...

[mrvan]

A nit but corporations are groups of people with all the rights and responsibilities of those individuals. We only treat them as "a person" as legal shorthand.

Not quite. The whole point of a incorporated / limited liability company and equivalent entities (Inc, llc, Ltd, SA, GmbH, NV, etc) is that owners are only liable up to their investment, i.e. you are not responsible for the debts of the corporation; not individually and not as a group. You can lose your investment, but that's the limit of your liability. If the group of owners of e.g. a coal plant would have the "rights and responsibilities" of the entity, they would be collectively responsible for its debts, e.g. cleanup costst, if it goes bankrupt. As a corporation, the plant goes bankrupt, the owners lose their investments (their shares are worthless), but remaining debts and liabilities cannot be collected.

Because this creates moral hazard and can cause society to be left with unpaid liabilities (tax, legal liabilities such as cleanup costs) historically they could only be created by special government fiat ("royal charter"), an implicit collective acceptance that the benefits outweigh the risk to society, and their number was quite limited for a long time, with famous corporations like the Dutch and British East India Companies among the earliest examples. Now, however, anybody and their uncle can start a llc/corporation, and while in theory the managers can be held responsible if they act in bad faith (e.g. take out loans, funnel the money to Caymans, declare bankruptcy) this is not prosecuted nearly often enough.

Re:What a load...

[psmoot]

Ah. Thank you for the clarification.

Re:What a load...

[Hognoxious]

Possibly this: it's wrong to say that if you tax corporations more they just increase prices for consumers, because if they could get away with the higher prices they'd already be charging them.

Re:What a load...

[religionofpeas]

Without the taxes, the competitor can choose to keep his prices lower.

Re:What a load...

[Hognoxious]

Why would one company be taxed and the other not? And why would someone take ten dollars profit if they could get 20?

Re:What a load...

[RandyHill]

And thank god we have corporations. Human progress would have been substantially slower if we still had debtors prisons and groups of people were reluctant to pool their capital to create new advances.

Re:What a load...

[religionofpeas]

You misunderstand. Let me try again:

if you tax corporations more they just increase prices for consumers, because if they could get away with the higher prices they'd already be charging them.

They can't get away with higher prices because people would shop at a competitor. But if you raise taxes for all of them, they can increase the price for consumers, because the competitor would do the same.

Re:What a load...

[Godwin O'Hitler]

We'll buy it if there's still money around to buy it.
But usually you get money from jobs. So if they want customers, they'd better make sure there are people working, unless they find some other way to give them money, like, oh I don't know, taxes?

Re:What a load...

[amiga3D]

If something is made by a robot then unless it contains some exotic materials the biggest expense of making it is delivery and sales. A new 50 inch TV today costs far less than a 32" model from 30 years ago despite using a fraction of the electricity and having a vastly better picture. Not to mention it weighs next to nothing. I wonder how much money we'll actually need in the future? The only thing that costs a lot more than it used to is healthcare.

Modern money theory

[tonywestonuk]

Bill gates doesn't have a clue. Not a clue.

If you tax robots, then there is LESS incentive to getting robots, and more work for humans to do.

Once you realise that tax does *not fund* expenditure, but is only there to prevent inflation and add value to money, you realise the absolute stupidity of what he suggests.

Re:Modern money theory

[h33t l4x0r]

That's his whole point. He's arguing for slowing down automation so that everyone doesn't lose their jobs all at once.

Re:Modern money theory

[alvinrod]

It doesn't make sense though. Imagine everyone was suddenly out of the job and replaced by a robot. What this means is that there's still the same (or maybe better) production of existing goods and services and suddenly a lot of newly available human labor. Assuming some small number of people don't own all this robot labor or there's a functional market, prices have to immediately collapse or there's no real sense in having all of these robots make things that no one can afford to buy.

In the real world the economy probably couldn't transition that quickly in a clean manner, but we don't see that much turn over in such a short amount of time either. Maybe the advancement curve means the rate of turnover is increasing, but it still results in more wealth per capita than any other time in human history. Today we think it's bad that our veterans have such poor medical care, but if you look back at history most had none at all. Society still can't afford to give them the care that they need, but with robots that care can become so much less expensive that what they can get will become better.

Our struggles and difficulties are only interesting or important because they are our own. In a few centuries they'll probably be little more than a footnote, perhaps a good time before a bad spell before an even greater time, or the opposite. More people are having better lives now than any time before in large part because of technological advancement.

Re:Modern money theory

[peragrin]

Gets better

Define robot taking away a job?

As 30 years ago. Companies would need lots of accountants and billing people. Those jobs were replaced by Windows computers running accounting software that did the math and run reports for them so they didn't need so many people to do more work than was previously possible.

Is that a robot since it replaced a high paying job?

Should Microsoft be taxed for job loss?

Why don't people ever think things through?

Re:Modern money theory

[JoeMerchant]

Society still can't afford to give them the care that they need, but with robots that care can become so much less expensive that what they can get will become better.

No, and yes. Society _can_ afford quality medical care, the delivery and compensation model in the U.S. is just so utterly twisted, inbred and corrupt that it only appears like we can't afford basic healthcare for everyone. Can every IED victim have a copy of the latest most highly developed prosthetics? No, but if we develop that tech in a responsible manner, maybe 2% of them can, and the other 98% can benefit from the much more highly developed, refined, and cost optimized 5-10 year old designs. The same goes for advanced care across the board - yes, it should be developed, no, we should not all be trying the latest theoretical cure for our incurable cancer when we might possibly benefit from it, or not - that's one of many problems with new med-tech - limited availability, unknown outcomes, astronomical costs, etc.

Will robots drive medical care costs down? Yes, but not nearly as fast as our current insanity of a care delivery and insurance system is spiraling costs upward.

Re:Modern money theory

[JoeMerchant]

Gates doesn't miss this point. He's got his billions, nobody's going to "claw back" all his money in retroactive taxes. What he's trying to say is that the next generation of multi-billionaires need to give more back up front, instead of getting to make the world's largest pile of cash and then attempting to figure out where to give away 10% of it before they die.

Re:Modern money theory

[drinkypoo]

Bill gates doesn't have a clue. Not a clue.

All evidence points to the contrary.

If you tax robots, then there is LESS incentive to getting robots, and more work for humans to do.

Bill Gates is heavily invested in industries which will involve human employees for the foreseeable future. His relative wealth is based in part upon the notion that workers will be taxed. If robots aren't taxed, then less taxes will be collected from workers, and then the rich will have to pay more taxes. This obviously isn't an option if you're Bill Gates; he must lie awake at night thinking about what a big portion of UBI he's going to have to pay for in those circumstances. So he wants the robots to pay taxes, so that he doesn't have to.

Of course, the notion that robots should pay taxes is a stupid one, unfounded in any reality. Tax corporate profits. If the corporations save money then they'll produce more profit. And, of course, end loopholes that the wealthy use to hide money, and tax them so that they can pay their fair share. But Bill Gates certainly wouldn't want that.

Re:Modern money theory

[ChrisMaple]

You sure have the clueless part right.

First, how is this law going to be enforced? A robot can be scaled to do any portion of a human's job, or the jobs of multiple people. See that thing that looks like a washing machine with paper slots - that's our engineering department. That thing that looks like a pizza oven is our production line. Government inspectors will be unable to determine how many people a robot replaces, or even if a particular machine is even a robot. If the government decides just to count the change in the number of warm bodies, the company will shut down and form 2 new companies. The first will be just the CEO. The other will be just robots, located in a place that doesn't tax robots and with all maintenance and ancillary functions outsourced.

Second, what's a robot? Machines will be designed to skirt any legal definition of a robot.

Third, the economics changes. Robots will cut costs, and if a manufacturer doesn't cut selling prices to match then competition will pop up to undercut that manufacturer. There won't be new profits to tax.

In his glee at having found a new way to oppress people, Gates hasn't thought through the obvious flaws in his nefarious scheme.

Re:Modern money theory

[ShanghaiBill]

If you tax robots, then there is LESS incentive to getting robots, and more work for humans to do.

This is the Lump of Labor Fallacy. There is not a fixed number of jobs in the economy, and automating a particular job out of existence does not mean fewer overall jobs. As automation reduces costs, people will spend their savings on other goods and services, creating jobs in other areas of the economy.

Re:Modern money theory

[religionofpeas]

And then you get passed by other countries left and right that don't artificially slow down their progress.

Re:Modern money theory

[h33t l4x0r]

but it still results in more wealth per capita than any other time in human history

It's interesting how you measure wealth, historically wealth was measured by land, gold, and gemstones. There's no argument that by that definition per capita wealth is much lower.

You prefer to measure it by access to health care (and possibly tv channels?), which I will agree that by your terms at least, people are somewhat better off, though still likely not better than US Americans when there was a stronger middle class (because there really haven't been any wonderful medical advances since 1960 or so). The point is, people benefit from having jobs that pay a good wage, not robots that take those jobs away. That's true unless you're the top 0.01% - those people may benefit from screwing the middle and working class, but even that remains to be seen.

Re:Modern money theory

[InfiniteLoopCounter]

Whilst you are going back to first principles, it might be worth asking yourself if "work" itself is needed or desirable long term. If it isn't I figure a good question is then how do we best transition away from it.

Re:Modern money theory

[Anonymous Coward]

He said tax robot owners, not the ones selling robots, or selling software for robots. Microsoft would owe nothing under this regime.

Re:Modern money theory

[GameboyRMH]

You should be happy to let another country rush into the end-state of capitalism first. It could serve as a cautionary example.

Re:Modern money theory

[religionofpeas]

It's interesting how you measure wealth, historically wealth was measured by land, gold, and gemstones. There's no argument that by that definition per capita wealth is much lower.

Only if you believe the price of gold and land have stayed the same, which makes no sense considering that their supply is limited.

Re:Modern money theory

[religionofpeas]

After they buy all your property, and compete with you on the global market for resources, there won't be anything left for you either.

Re:Modern money theory

[GameboyRMH]

You place your bets, I'll place mine...

Re:Modern money theory

[RandyHill]

Yes he's arguing to end progress, we apparently have everything we need. It's really one of the dumbest ideas ever.

Every bit of progress the human race has made has eliminated jobs. See how many people it took to make a car in 1920 (and how crappy that car was).

Automation is just going to make us wealthier and create new jobs, like it always has. I've lived through Malthusians telling me we were out of resources in 1973, as well as peak oil, etc, etc. Malthusians have a 300 year track record of being wrong every single time.

Re:Modern money theory

[Godwin O'Hitler]

Don't knock him.
Right or wrong, he's addressing an inescapable future problem. Which other listened-to names are addressing it? What is your alternative solution?

Re:Modern money theory

[soc_cost_priv_gains]

Correction, the people who still have jobs will spend their savings on other goods and services. The ones who were left jobless will be out searching for employment, if their skills are transferable all is well, otherwise they join the ranks of the unemployed. But the rest of us who still have jobs get to enjoy cheaper goods and services, yay for us!

Re:Modern money theory

[soc_cost_priv_gains]

I think we will need to change people's attitudes about the idea of "work." Right now if you are not working it is because you are a lazy bum. Many people define themselves by the work they do. This will need to change first before we can transition to some kind of UBI.

Re:Modern money theory

[syntotic]

Gates does no understand in Economics we do not believe, but we prove and show? Which Gates said so, the one from COMDEX or the miniversion that was in pictures around online? He is implicitly turning one variable into labour when labour is a variable made to distinguish between those variables. What is funny is should we do what he says he simplifies it all into workers.

No Taxation without Representation

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you seriously want the robots to VOTE??

Re:No Taxation without Representation

[Applehu Akbar]

Do you seriously want the robots to VOTE??

Caution: tax robots too much, and you will turn them into Republicans clustering in gated data centers that humans cannot enter.

Re:No Taxation without Representation

[soc_cost_priv_gains]

That is no problem, they will just be programmed to vote against their own interests.

tax profit yes but not to slow automation

[presidenteloco]

Look. We're going to have to accept, in the near future, that smart machines are better than humans at many tasks.

So why would we want, as humans, to keep doing those tasks? Isn't that just embarrassing to keep trying? You're not actually being useful. You're just pretending to be.

So yes, businesses that make profit via automated processes should pay tax to help give people a UBI (universal basic income), but the tax shouldn't be different than paid by any profitable business.

Why keep people working at tasks they are second-rate at? Doesn't make any sense. People should be free to find something actually meaningful and useful to do, given their unique experience and talent. They shouldn't do make-work projects that a robot can do better. That's just a dumb policy.

Re:tax profit yes but not to slow automation

[s.petry]

Yes.. and I'm guessing you are one of those that champion a living wage?

No. Of course that won't stop you from making more bad assumptions or silly statements will it?

You should watch and understand.. the movie Elysium.

Got it, you believe that movies are reality. Sadly I'm not surprised.

The sample case is the state of California.. where the people dependent on assistance exceed those employed and have broken the 50% level. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.

People on Welfare are mostly stuck in poverty and it's extremely hard to get out. Hence we have a huge amount of crime in those same areas, because many people see it as their only way out. That fact alone backs my statement that humans want to make progress, have security, have better lives for their children, have a retirement, buy a better house, etc.. etc.. etc...

Innovation, or theft of innovations, creates NEW wealth. Innovation does not divide wealth, and nobody mentioned dividing wealth. Except you, proving my point about bad assumptions and silly statements

In summary, go back to your bong and let the adults discuss the important issues.

Re:tax profit yes but not to slow automation

[JoeMerchant]

Smart machines are already much better at tasks I used to do by hand.

In the 1980s I was hand-writing 6502 assembly code. I don't do that anymore. I don't even know how most of the current Skylake, et. al. x86 instruction sets work - smart machines do that for me.

I used to hand-code instructions to 16550 UART chips to feed data across RS-232 lines, I handled the framing, timing, response to interrupt when the 16 byte buffer was ready for more data, etc. Today I'm issuing packets to AMQP exchanges that distribute them over TCP/IP, my data doesn't just travel across the room, it's distributed globally, and "smart machines" handle a half dozen protocol layers between my data and the kind of things I used to program the 16550 chips to do.

People built those "robots" in the last 20 years, and because of them we're all doing more, with less work. (let's not even get into the contrast between /. and the BBS code I wrote to run over a 300 baud modem...)

Re:tax profit yes but not to slow automation

[clovis]

You should watch and understand.. the movie Elysium.

Got it, you believe that movies are reality. Sadly I'm not surprised.

I've seen other's make that response on Slashdot when someone suggests seeing a movie, show, or read some book to explain some point.
Aw, c'mon people. You know perfectly well literature, movies, theatre, etc are a way to explore what-if scenario's, to make predictions, and to hold up a mirror to some aspect of reality that may not be easy to quantify. You use literature to conduct Gedankenexperiments because there's no way to do ABA testing on human society. The method is older than Socrates.

For example, suppose you were talking to someone who was thinking about morality and self-interest and you suggested they read Atlas Shrugged or something else that explores that topic, or even see a movie made from the book. Suppose they responded with "So you think books are reality". Would you think that person was being a retard or just a jerk? And it's not an XOR in this case.
Either way, saying that doesn't do anything to validate whatever point you were originally trying to make.

Re:tax profit yes but not to slow automation

[s.petry]

There is a big difference between movies and books. Most recently, but also historically, movies have been propaganda. Next, I may reference books and suggest people read them (as I'm about to do) but I don't just make up stories as AC did and then say "go watch and understand a movie" for life lessons.

Interestingly you mentioned a book which demonstrates my original point, because I have read Atlas Shrugged. Hopefully you did too. The individual and Capitalism are both celebrated in that book. Imagine a world full of James Taggarts and Orren Boyles, with no Dagney Taggarts, no Hank Reardens, and no John Ghalts.

Re:tax profit yes but not to slow automation

[Registered Coward v2]

Why keep people working at tasks they are second-rate at? Doesn't make any sense. People should be free to find something actually meaningful and useful to do, given their unique experience and talent. They shouldn't do make-work projects that a robot can do better. That's just a dumb policy.

Perhaps, but absent a retooling of the educational system so people gain the ability and skills to do more "meaningful" work all you will do is create a group of unemployable people.

Re:tax profit yes but not to slow automation

[aod7br7932]

Because the New Jobs have high educacional requirements and people cant afford It. How would you solve this pickle?

Re:tax profit yes but not to slow automation

[Voyager529]

(let's not even get into the contrast between /. and the BBS code I wrote to run over a 300 baud modem...)

The BBS code loaded faster?

Re:tax profit yes but not to slow automation

[clovis]

but I don't just make up stories as AC did and then say "go watch and understand a movie" for life lessons.

You're right about that.
It's another forum curse that people like our AC just throws up some assertion and says "go see ", or book, without stating how or why it may support that assertion.
I'd like to know before investing 90 minutes whether the AC is telling us the Elysium movie shows us a future in which medical technology greatly extends our lives and health, or was the point that we should kill the rich people and take their stuff.

Another one we see here is the AC that makes some statement, and provides a web link to some article that contradicts their position.
Or the "just google it" response.

This was clovis responding to s.petry ^^^^^^
Dunno why my login went away

Re:tax profit yes but not to slow automation

[dryeo]

If you're going to read Atlas Shrugged, you should also read a counter-point such as "The Grapes of Wrath", especially as it shows what actually happens with automation (tractors), capitalism and human nature.

Re:tax profit yes but not to slow automation

[s.petry]

Seems like we agree much more than initially hinted at.

Logical conclusion.

[Stoutlimb]

Let's start with printers, photocopiers, faxes and PC's and hand calculators. They put hundreds of thousands of office workers out of work.

Re:Logical conclusion.

[Kjella]

Let's start with printers, photocopiers, faxes and PC's and hand calculators. They put hundreds of thousands of office workers out of work.

That's what I was thinking... besides, unless you mean like literally replaced what has say Amazon meant for the retail industry? How many brick-and-mortar jobs have been lost and would they count somehow? Probably not. So basically the same thing would happen except it would be new companies pushing out old companies instead.

Re:Logical conclusion.

[Daemonik]

Amazon actually gives small companies a place to market their products to a larger audience. If you want to blame a company for killing Mom & Pop shops, Wal-Mart has done more to kill American workers than just about anyone. Not content to destroy their competitors in large swaths of the country, they've pushed companies into offshoring to China to guarantee they get the prices they want.

Re:Logical conclusion.

[Applehu Akbar]

Let's start with printers, photocopiers, faxes and PC's and hand calculators. They put hundreds of thousands of office workers out of work.

By making offices more efficient, this tech created a lot more office work, with a net gain of human employees even at the reduced ratio of machine to man.

Own the robot

[backslashdot]

Don't tax it, own it. Humans8 should invest in robot companies and live off the revenue thereof. Robots will make things cheap. Robotic indoor farming. Basic math shows that one large indoor farming skyscraper like they are building in Singapore or even an underground facility powered by a large solar array or other power plant (nuclear fusion, maybe in 25 years) would be able to provide all the food for a large city. For security purposes obviously you would want these spread out over neighborhoods like Freight Farms is trying to do. I personally wish to expand my own high yield indoor vegetable farm so that I won't need to purchase tomatoes or potatoes ever. I already automated lighting and watering with an arduino and raspberry pi .. I could easily envision the fertilizing, harvest, and planting could be automated.

Re:Own the robot

[Gussington]

Don't tax it, own it. Humans8 should invest in robot companies and live off the revenue thereof.

If you take automation to the logical conclusion, there is no need for ownership or tax. These things only exist under a resource scarce environment. You only need money to pay for things, but automation could free us of this, since full automation means every step of the process from material creation/extraction to end product or service costs nothing. The robots make themselves and service themselves, so there is no cost to anything. If there is no cost, then everything is free, therefore accessible to all. The age of real, ubiquitous freedom is upon us.

Re:Own the robot

[FunkSoulBrother]

Good luck getting that through the heads of the libertarians who will stand in the way of building out the initial automation that would free us.

Re:Own the robot

[Anonymice]

Well we wouldn't want those damned conservatives pushing their dirty socialist ideals on us now, would we!

Re:Own the robot

[ChrisMaple]

What part of "liberty" do you not understand?

Re:Own the robot

[Gussington]

Good luck getting that through the heads of the libertarians who will stand in the way of building out the initial automation that would free us.

I'm not sure you understand what the word libertarian means. The clue is in the title, libertarians believe in liberty for all, the freedom to do what you want, including building robots, if you so choose. The likely voice of dissent against automation will be conservatives, who seem to support whatever it is that keeps existing big business in power. They prefer centralised power and control, which automation is going to dismantle.

Billy reads my posts

[slickwillie]

I've been posting that idea on Internet forums for a while now.

I guess Gates visits the same conspiracy theory forums that I do. I hope he gets more mileage out of than I do.

Re:Billy reads my posts

[slickwillie]

I should have RTFA first. I think it should go farther than Gates' idea. Robots should pay income tax and the funds should be used for universal basic income for humans.

*facepalm*

[DivineKnight]

*facepalm*

Re:*facepalm*

[freeze128]

I bet I can make a robot to facepalm so you don't have to...

Great idea

[guruevi]

Let the countries that don't tax their robot manufacturers take all the production AND the jobs.

The problem isn't robots or automation, it's corporations like Microsoft and people like Gates that are the problem. They pay taxes at zero or even negative rates and then expect the government to provide "free" healthcare and unemployment for their employees (which in turn makes their employees pay for it).

I'd say repeal all taxes and only tax things coming in over state borders at one rate and things coming in over national borders at a higher rate for all finished products and "intellectual property". This would encourage more local and domestic development. If Microsoft wants to import code from India, have it taxed based on the time and resources it took to develop abroad -or- if they want to avoid that, have it put into public domain.

Re:Great idea

[ljw1004]

Let the countries that don't tax their robot manufacturers take all the production AND the jobs.

Great idea. Gates was talking about two jobs in particular - driving and warehouse work. Next time you want a lorry load of goods hauled from Seattle to Spokane, why not just outsource the driving work to India?

Re:Great idea

[psmoot]

The problem isn't robots or automation, it's corporations like Microsoft and people like Gates that are the problem. They pay taxes at zero or even negative rates and then expect the government to provide "free" healthcare and unemployment for their employees (which in turn makes their employees pay for it).

Microsoft ultimately doesn't pay taxes. Only people bear the burden of taxes. That could be Microsoft's employees (through lower wages), customers (through higher prices) or investors (through lower profits), generally a combination of all three. Microsoft is only the channel the government uses to collect the taxes. That being said, I don't think the Billster avoids all taxes. Very few people pay no taxes.

I'm not sure why Microsoft should provide charity to people. I'd much rather Microsoft (and other companies) focused on producing products and services. Charity and aid to the poor is something else. It should be driven by individuals and/or society as a whole through our government. I think bringing corporations into it just confuses the situation.

I'd say repeal all taxes and only tax things coming in over state borders at one rate and things coming in over national borders at a higher rate for all finished products and "intellectual property".

I'm with you up until the border thing. Economists tend to think the most efficient and least distorting thing to do is toss all existing taxes and replace them all with a single, broad-based consumption tax. I despair of that ever happening. Politicians and lobbyists have way too much interest in putting in as many special provisions as they can.

Re:Great idea

[phantomfive]

Economists tend to think the most efficient and least distorting thing to do is toss all existing taxes and replace them all with a single, broad-based consumption tax.

I won't support that because it's broadly regressive: poor people pay a higher percentage of their income as tax. You can kind of balance it out, but when that happens (like in California), the middle class pays the highest percentage.

Re:Great idea

[Is Don the new Ron]

Let the countries that don't tax their robot manufacturers take all the production AND the jobs.

Great idea. Gates was talking about two jobs in particular - driving and warehouse work. Next time you want a lorry load of goods hauled from Seattle to Spokane, why not just outsource the driving work to India?

Who knows, with telepresence you might be able to outsource your driving to India. Main problem is the latency. So we might need some obstruction avoidance AI to take care of the occasional stray child, drunk or deer, while the remote human operator takes charge of the overall direction of the trip, e.g. what to do if there's a pile-up, or a landslide or some other landmark-altering incident.

Re:Great idea

[arobatino]

1) If a consumption tax is implemented as a personal expenditure tax, instead of a sales tax or VAT, it can be just as progressive as the current income tax. Instead of computing income for the year and looking up the tax in a table, compute income - savings = consumption for the year instead. The progressivity is built into the tax table.

2) Don't overlook that for most people, the biggest tax burden is not the income tax, but the payroll tax, which is literally regressive (since it taxes every dollar of income at a flat rate up to a certain threshold, where the SS part of the tax goes to zero, so the rate is much lower for high incomes). Basically it has a high income cutoff rather than a low income cutoff, like the income tax. It also generally doesn't touch investment income, only wages. Even a "flat" consumption tax (with a prebate to cancel the tax for spending below the poverty level) together with eliminating the payroll tax, would probably be more progressive than the current tax system.

Re:Great idea

[guruevi]

If "poor" people (not sure how anyone in the US can be considered poor) spend their income and "rich" people spend their income, they would be taxed at equal rates. People that are richer, already pay premium prices for products and have more of them, so they would pay accordingly. Obviously you could tax luxury goods higher, my proposal would be that if they spend it on things produced *locally* they would pay less taxes so that more money goes around in the local economy, less is wasted both environmentally and fiscally on long-haul shipping.

I would not advocate for just a flat tax, there is a point to income taxes, most of us already pay sales taxes but we only pay sales taxes for local commerce which is ass-backwards, it's cheaper and easier to buy stuff out-of-state including the shipping than buy locally (locally you have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get the tax removed)

Currently there are too many loopholes and exceptions in the tax code that benefit the 'richer' people. Sure they pay more in taxes absolutely but compared to 'us' as a percentage, they pay way less. I'm close to the threshold myself where I can spend a little bit on various 'investments' in order to reduce my tax burden, so I do but in the end, these investments benefit primarily the bankers. According to my tax accountant, the percentage and even the absolute amount of taxes paid has gone down as my income has grown.

Re:Great idea

[phantomfive]

If "poor" people (not sure how anyone in the US can be considered poor) spend their income and "rich" people spend their income, they would be taxed at equal rates.

Obviously. Rich people don't spend their income at equal rates as poor people. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you spend all of it. If you're rich, you can save money for investments.

Re:Great idea

[phantomfive]

Instead of computing income for the year and looking up the tax in a table, compute income - savings = consumption for the year instead. The progressivity is built into the tax table.

That's like giving rich people a no-limit Roth IRA tax shelter, except instead of paying taxes before you put money in, you never have to pay taxes.

Re:Great idea

[arobatino]

Lifestyle is determined by consumption, not wealth or income. The tax is paid when the money is spent, at a much higher rate than the rich pay now (which is as low as zero - see buy/borrow/die). The rich already have the no-limit tax shelter under the current tax system, and unlike the consumption tax, it allows them to spend as much as they want.

Re:Great idea

[phantomfive]

That's an argument for closing tax loopholes, not for building regressiveness into the system. You're never going to win an election by saying, "The rich earn more money than you but it doesn't need to be taxed because [they don't spend it]."

Re:Great idea

[phantomfive]

compute income - savings = consumption

btw I've been thinking about this. How are you thinking of implementing it? The only ways I can think of that will actually work are much more invasive of privacy than what we have now.

Re:Great idea

[Pfhorrest]

Or repeal all taxes except one huge tax on all unearned income from rents and interest, and let the people truly making money just by having it pay for everything or else stop doing that (win for everyone else either way).

Re:Great idea

[psmoot]

Obviously. Rich people don't spend their income at equal rates as poor people. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you spend all of it. If you're rich, you can save money for investments.

And the other way to look at it is that the rich spend way, way more in absolute dollars so they'd pay way, way more actual tax. That's not exactly unfair.

Re:Great idea

[psmoot]

I just looked up the federal tax burden progressivity. The first hit was this. If you add up all the taxes, the overall trend is highly progressive now. I'd love to scrap all the taxes (income, SS, excise, estate, capital gains, and corporate income tax) and replace the whole kit and kaboodle.

The common suggestion I hear is to have a tax refund or credit for everyone. Heck, that could even be the guaranteed basic income if the numbers work out. That would make it progressive if that's what you want. One beauty of a national sales tax is it doesn't require a lot of bookkeeping and privacy-invading paperwork.

Re:Great idea

[psmoot]

That's an argument for closing tax loopholes, not for building regressiveness into the system.

Yeah, I'd like to close all the tax loopholes and make the system much simpler and transparent. The more complicated you make it, the more likely people will find ways to game it. I'm willing to give up a lot of potential perfection and tuning to get simplicity.

We probably need a better definition of "regressive". I think my idea differs from yours. I think we both agree the SS tax is regressive: you tend to pay a lower percentage of your income as your income goes up. Income tax is progressive, you generally pay a higher rate as your income increases. How about your typical state sales tax? I don't think that's progressive or regressive: everyone pays the same rate, regardless of income. It sounds like you believe it is regressive because you're looking at the tax dollar as a percent of income, not a percent of what's being taxed.

I got curious and looked up the definition of a "progressive tax" and found both of our definitions. Wikipedia thinks if the rate goes up as the taxed amount goes up, it's progressive. Investopedia thinks a progressive tax has a higher rate for higher income people, not on the value of what is taxed. Interesting.

Re:Great idea

[phantomfive]

That's a "widow's mite" situation........the rich pay more absolute cash, but it hurts their lifestyle less. For a poor person, $100 is a lot more meaningful.

Re:Great idea

[phantomfive]

That's some good analysis and information gathering.

Re:Great idea

[arobatino]

The buy/borrow loophole is pretty much built into any tax based on income (due to the realization requirement on cap gains and the fact that borrowed money is not considered income). Good luck on closing it without changing the tax base from income to something else. And a wealth tax would probably be counterproductive as rich people would flee, except for taxing property which people can't take with them.

Besides, I already pointed out in my original comment how a consumption tax can be just as progressive as an income tax. Why do you keep insisting that it has to be regressive? Is it because the tax isn't imposed preemptively, before people decide to spend? People aren't going to hoard their money forever - eventually the heirs will squander it, as happens to all fortunes eventually, and then it will get taxed at a high rate (and the people squandering it don't care about the tax, which makes collecting tax a lot easier than if it was imposed on the people originally earning the money).

And in the meantime the payroll tax, which is literally a regressive tax, and is a bigger burden to low- and middle-income people than the income tax, continues and no one cares about it. If you're concerned with loopholes, start with that one.

Re:Great idea

[arobatino]

How about your typical state sales tax? I don't think that's progressive or regressive: everyone pays the same rate, regardless of income.

It can be considered regressive in the sense that poor people spend a greater fraction of their earnings, so the amount they pay in sales tax is a greater fraction of their earnings (even though the tax rate is the same).

That's what the "prebate" in national sales tax proposals attempt to deal with. It makes the tax progressive at the very low income end, close to the poverty level (in fact, below the poverty level, you'd get money back). Unfortunately, it rapidly becomes flat as income rises above the poverty level. If a consumption tax is implemented as a personal consumption tax (tax income - savings = consumption once a year according to a tax table), that doesn't have to be true - the rate can continue to rise with rising consumption, since the progressivity is built into the tax table.

Re:Great idea

[arobatino]

Sorry, I meant "personal expenditure tax", not "personal consumption tax".

Re:Great idea

[phantomfive]

Besides, I already pointed out in my original comment how a consumption tax can be just as progressive as an income tax.

Your argument wasn't very convincing. Your plan is essentially to give them an unlimited 401k tax shelter.

Re:Great idea

[arobatino]

Your argument wasn't very convincing. Your plan is essentially to give them an unlimited 401k tax shelter.

Yes, basically to give everyone an unlimited 401k (with no RMD at age 70.5). Like a 401k, the money gets taxed when it's taken out (when it's spent). And if the tax rate is highly progressive, when the balance gets high enough, there's no way to spend it as fast as it's growing without incurring a very high tax rate. The only other ways to avoid that are to either watch it grow forever, without ever spending more than enough to avoid the high tax rate (which is unlikely given that inherited money is usually squandered within 3 generations, and also pointless, because then why have that much money?), or to give it away. I suppose a rich family could theoretically breed like rabbits as a loophole if they didn't want to give it to charity.

Re:Great idea

[arobatino]

Google "personal expenditure tax". Economists have been fond of it for a long time, although it's almost never been implemented. Basically it's just a modification of the current income tax, where instead of computing income once a year, you compute consumption = income - savings (where debt is equivalent to negative savings, so borrowing is added, eliminating the buy/borrow loophole, and paying off debt is subtracted). The current system already has income being reported to the IRS, and I don't recall reading any concerns that the invasion of privacy would be worse than now.

Re:Great idea

[phantomfive]

The only other ways to avoid that are to either watch it grow forever,

That's exactly what you do, accrue more and more capital, which historically has become a serious problem as a few families own too much and push other people out.

Re:Great idea

[LienRag]

And other economists consider that the most efficient is collective propriety of the means of production (which is even more logical with robots: who should own a Free Software? An Open Hardware? A robot made by robots?)...

No

[alzoron]

as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of automation and to fund other types of employment.

What the hell for? Let's get everything fully automated as soon as possible so we can get the basic income uprising out of the way and we can all do whatever we want instead of what we feel we have to do.

Re:No

[Wycliffe]

as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of automation and to fund other types of employment.

What the hell for? Let's get everything fully automated as soon as possible so we can get the basic income uprising out of the way and we can all do whatever we want instead of what we feel we have to do.

I agree. Ignoring the fact that it's impossible to draw the line between a robot and a machine (is a calculator a robot?, what about a self service checkout?), I think the best solution for excess labor is probably to just start reducing hours worked per week in lockstep. If we reduced hours worked from 40 to 30 then we would instantly create 25% more jobs. As jobs get automated away, we could continue to reduce hours worked until people were only working a few hours per week. It's really the supply versus demand that is the problem. There are a ton of crappy jobs right now because the supply of "unskilled" human labor is greater than the demand. For the foreseeable future though, there will still be jobs that only humans can do so if we want wages to go up, the best way to do this is to either decrease the supply or increase the demand. Increasing the demand is going to be hard. Decreasing the supply is much easier. Death or population control would be one gruesome way. Another solution is to cap the hours worked per week. Companies would still need those jobs filled and would have to pay more per hour for people to be willing to work them and also need to hire more people to fill the same number of hours.

Re:No

[ChrisMaple]

Surprise, surprise. Come up with a phony problem, and you'll find someone encouraging the use of government guns to solve it.

Robots allow more productivity. That's a problem (???). Let's have a bunch of cops force you to work shorter weeks.

Re:Sure

[Anonymous Coward]

...Cause corporations already have great reputations for paying taxes.

Such as Microsoft, the company founded by Bill Gates, which has cheated the state of Washington out of billions of dollars in taxes by claiming that all of it's revenue comes from a tiny office in Nevada.

No Taxation without Representation!

[Grog6]

We have to build the Robot Legislator First. (!)

Then the Robot Union... :facepalm:

We won't notice anything wrong until the "Robots Hunting Humans" reality TV series.

And even then, there won't be any outcry until Season 3 at least. :)

Because Human Nature

[s.petry]

Don't pretend that science does not exist just because your narrative is harmed by science. Most normal humans don't want to sit around and do nothing, they want to be productive and make personal goals, balance risk versus security, have control of their destiny, and be able to provide better for their families than they did for themselves. Normal humans don't want to have the same job as everyone else, don't want to live in the same kind of house, wear the same kinds of clothing, eat the same foods, etc.. etc.. etc... The whole point of every story of Utopia ever written is that Utopia CAN NOT EXIST! Individuality is part of being a human, and individual liberty is the normal state of a human.

Don't sit around telling us how great science is when you ignore it.

Re:Because Human Nature

[hackwrench]

People want to feel productive and as if they have control of their destiny. They don't actually make much effort to confirm if they actually do. If they did, it would be perfectly fine for robots to take over the jobs, because they would realize they could find ways that actually contributed to productivity and not just was more productive than nobody or thing doing something but less productive than robots being as productive as they can be.

Re:Because Human Nature

[amiga3D]

I'll be happy to settle in on 40 acres in the back end of nowhere, raise some crops and animals and enjoy life. I want to work but I don't want a fucking job. I don't want a boss.

Re:Because Human Nature

[jenningsthecat]

...Most normal humans don't want to sit around and do nothing, they want to be productive and make personal goals, balance risk versus security, have control of their destiny, and be able to provide better for their families than they did for themselves. Normal humans don't want to have the same job as everyone else, don't want to live in the same kind of house, wear the same kinds of clothing, eat the same foods, etc.. etc.. etc... The whole point of every story of Utopia ever written is that Utopia CAN NOT EXIST! Individuality is part of being a human, and individual liberty is the normal state of a human.

You should check out Marshall Brain's 'Manna'. The point of its utopia is that it could be made to exist, and the people who live in it are as varied and individualistic as they care to be. I find one of the premises of his utopia a bit far-fetched and a bit creepy, but that's probably only because a), I'm old and b), I haven't lived through the huge displacement caused by ubiquitous automation and AI. He makes a compelling case for what we might be if we do inventive and sensible things in response to our own sweeping innovations. He imagines a future wherein people lead meaningful, satisfying, creative, and productive lives according to their best own lights, freed from the burden of having to work to secure food, clothing, shelter, and spurious social status.

Re:Because Human Nature

[Kjella]

Don't pretend that science does not exist just because your narrative is harmed by science. Most normal humans don't want to sit around and do nothing, they want to be productive and make personal goals

Yes, but it's vastly overrated how much personal goals are productive to somebody else. I know lots of people have hobbies and interests they'd like to spend more time on, but they have no interest in competing in sports at a professional level. They have no interest in making a product for sale or a service for anyone else. Achievements are things like reading a book, climbing a mountain, travelling the world, learning to cook, building a model train in your basement or raiding in WoW. The primary driver for doing anything that's of any value to anyone but yourself is usually the paycheck. I wouldn't sit idle, no... but net I'd be way busier consuming than producing.

Re:Because Human Nature

[Applehu Akbar]

I'll be happy to settle in on 40 acres in the back end of nowhere, raise some crops and animals and enjoy life. I want to work but I don't want a fucking job. I don't want a boss.

If you actually had to farm forty acres, you would want to invest in some up-to-date farm machinery, thereby starting the cycle all over again.

Re:Because Human Nature

[phantomfive]

The whole point of every story of Utopia ever written is that Utopia CAN NOT EXIST!

I'm 90% sure that wasn't the point of the actual Utopia. Excellent book, btw; highly recommend.

Re:Because Human Nature

[Jeremi]

Most normal humans don't want to sit around and do nothing, they want to be productive and make personal goals, balance risk versus security, have control of their destiny, and be able to provide better for their families than they did for themselves.

The above is all very true, but it doesn't follow that humans therefore want to spend their working hours doing tedious manual labor that could be done better by a robot. (I'm not sure you were saying that it did follow, btw)

Ask just about anyone what their dream job would be, and they'll tell you. Ask them why they aren't currently doing their dream job, and they'll tell you that as well -- often it's because there's little or no money to be made as an actor or dance instructor or professional hang glider pilot or artisanal woodworker or etc. Many of these activities can only be hobbies instead of jobs, because people need to feed their children and pay the rent, and so they are forced into doing whatever drudgery the market is willing to pay for, instead of the activities they are really good at and enjoy doing.

But does it have to be that way forever? Without robots and AI, the answer is probably, yes -- there are un-fun tasks that nevertheless need to be done, so those are largely the tasks that society is willing to pay for. The garbage bins aren't going to empty themselves, and all that.

But in a future society where robots can perform most of these everyday tasks effectively "for free"; there is no reason to force a human being to do those tasks. Instead, with the menial labor done by robots, the wage-slaves could then be freed up to pursue whatever "dream job" they want to have, regardless of whether they can find someone willing to pay them much (or anything) to do that job, or not.

How could they afford it? Either because the robot labor has made goods and services so cheap that even a minimal salary is still plenty to meet one's financial needs, or because a system has been set up to tax the robots and use that money to subsidize paying salaries for jobs that would otherwise not be economically possible. Probably a combination of those two things.

Is that happy scenario inevitable? Not on the short term -- the default scenario would be that the owners of the robots keep all their robot-generated wealth to themselves, and become incredibly rich while everyone else becomes unemployed. But what happens then -- when 99% of the population is on welfare? The only difference between that and the "happy scenario" is that the out-of-work majority has no incentive to do anything constructive, and is still viewing their unemployment as a personal failure rather than an inevitable consequence of superhuman AI -- and that stigma will fade rapidly once it becomes apparent that it applies to everyone, not just to the traditional "losers". At that point, people will stop calling it "welfare" and start calling it a "basic living stipend", and if democracy still exists, they will adjust the funding levels provided by it such that the robots' productivity is enjoyed by all and not just by the super-rich.

But that leaves the problem of hopeless couch-potato-ism; so an enhancement to just cash handouts would be encouraging people to pursue their dream activities, and paying them to do so. Then we'd have people living rewarding lives that they chose for themselves, rather than sitting around feeling bad about being on the dole, or slowly dying inside doing tedious make-work.

Re:Because Human Nature

[presidenteloco]

Ok so human nature has many of us wanting to strive and do better and do something valuable.
I agree.
But you haven't addressed how this urge is going to be satisfied when say 50% of jobs are replaced by automation and the remaining jobs are jobs where humans and machines do the job together so the remaining human work component (say, of being a doctor) is devalued to about half its current economic value.

You seem to be implying that we can just put our finger in the dam, and our other hand over our eyes so we won't accept or acknowledge what's coming and will somehow magically prevent this transition from happening. I'm telling you that's wishful thinking. If there's a more cost-effective way of doing some necessary task with more or better automation, some organization somewhere is going to be offering to do it that way for cheap, and the market will move to that, disrupting the current way of doing it with more labour. Have you looked at the self-order McDonald's restaurants lately, or self-checkouts in stores? A small, small harbinger of what's to come.

I'm saying we have to be as innovative at dealing with this socioeconomically as we are innovative in developing this highly automated economy in the first place.
Exactly what that looks like I don't know, but it would seem it's either some form of UBI. If we don't do that, we'll have much greater inequality of means than even now, and with that, will come social turmoil and irrational "solutions". It is not a stretch to say that what made Herr Trump's election possible was loss of jobs and job value to automation, and the deluded belief that immigrants and cheap labour around the world were to blame. It is mostly automation causing this hollowing out of employment opportunities. And the robots and AIs are already inside the walls.

So, I'm just saying that yammering "No No No No No" is not a solution and is not going to stop the rising tide of automated economy. Let me read your creative solution to this changed environment instead.

Re:Because Human Nature

[Kaenneth]

"The whole point of every story of Utopia ever written is that Utopia CAN NOT EXIST!"

made up scary stories are not proof of anything.

Re:Because Human Nature

[amiga3D]

My Dad had a Farmall Cub that we used for 5 acres we had and it was more than adequate. I worked about 3 acres for years as a kid. We had plenty of food and ended up giving a lot of it away. My parents had a cow when I was very small and my brother milked him every morning. It's amazing how much different fresh milk tastes. I had 240 chickens I tended as a teenager. Fresh eggs and plenty of young fryers for the table. What I really miss is the Fig trees. I like figs better than candy. Blue Jays loved them too.

Re:Because Human Nature

[s.petry]

Do you mean "social science"? :)

Actually yes. Economics, History, Psychology, Biology, Anthropology, and Sociology are all real "social sciences" which co-mingle well together using facts like wealth, census data, longevity, health, crime rates, etc... Perhaps you were attempting to throw up a strawman pretending that intersectionality and gender studies is the only form of social science? While I'd agree with the latter being a modern phrenology, that does not dismiss a whole heap of real sciences.

Nuh uh is the remainder of your post, so not worth responding to. Except for your last line with is a flat out lie. Communication has evolved in nearly every culture since recorded history. So who's making up bullshit?

Re:Because Human Nature

[Your.Master]

Perhaps you were attempting to throw up a strawman pretending that intersectionality and gender studies is the only form of social science?

That's a little out of left-field; maybe not everything in life is about your beef with feminists or whatever.

The issue with the social sciences isn't that they are invalid, but:

1. They are not super extrapolatory into new conditions.
2. Economics does not say "humans want to do labour" it says "go robots".

The social sciences are not providing a united front on this issue. I am strongly of the opinion that human purpose does not mean you need a job that a robot could do -- just look at all the stay-at-home parents, or look at the idle rich (and note I'm not claiming all rich people are idle rich), or hell, look at the phenomenon of slackers. I am more into the idea of increasing efficiencies improving the lot of all, either by increasing total economic output, or decreasing the total human labour input, which several social sciences also point to as something that has improved the lot of human life.

Nuh uh is the remainder of your post, so not worth responding to.

That is so self-unaware it's kind of hilarious.

Except for your last line with is a flat out lie. Communication has evolved in nearly every culture since recorded history. So who's making up bullshit?

That's kind of the point. The normal state of a human is something we humans made up. With that said, I agree with your statement, but I am confused why you think making humans do the of robots is not anti-individuality and anti-liberty.

Re:Because Human Nature

[s.petry]

You proved nothing wrong, you simply claimed "nu uh" on every item. Facts back my position, not yours. Financial holdings and wealth are constantly changing, mostly upward in Western "Free" countries.

Ryan and Rand

[ThatsNotPudding]

Years ago, the Right Wing realized the US has waaay more people than they needed (those needs only being cord wood troopers for lucrative Endless War (TM), former Seal Team 6 security goons, and only the top-shelf prostitutes and rent boys). So short of rolling the cattle trucks and firing up the ovens, how best to get rid of all these useless people?

The total destruction of any type of governmental safety net. Cut most and privatize the rest (just like they are with jails and prisons), and all those un-needed proles will stop dropping like flies. First the aged, then the disabled, and most of the poor (with of a carve-out for the true believer white ones).

Donald's daily circus shit-show is merely distraction from the real agenda of Ayn Rand devotees like Ryan.

Re:Ryan and Rand

[Anonymous Coward]

Years ago, the Right Wing realized the US has waaay more people than they needed (those needs only being cord wood troopers for lucrative Endless War (TM), former Seal Team 6 security goons, and only the top-shelf prostitutes and rent boys). So short of rolling the cattle trucks and firing up the ovens, how best to get rid of all these useless people?

The total destruction of any type of governmental safety net. Cut most and privatize the rest (just like they are with jails and prisons), and all those un-needed proles will stop dropping like flies. First the aged, then the disabled, and most of the poor (with of a carve-out for the true believer white ones).

Donald's daily circus shit-show is merely distraction from the real agenda of Ayn Rand devotees like Ryan.

Super interesting because of course a safety net makes folks have lots more kids - which is why countries with no safety nets have the lowest birth rates...

Wait hold hold....that actually is exactly the opposite of what we observe in the real world....How big of a safety net do most Africans have? Just about nothing. How many kids do they have? A whole lot more than the US or most other countries

So +5 insightful so something that is clearly demonstrably totally false if we look at the real world....there are plenty of things to complain about the right wing, but for god sake they are the ones against birth control...your premise is actually laughable

Re:Ryan and Rand

[virtig01]

The total destruction of any type of governmental safety net.

Hrm, "total destruction" is a lot less comprehensive than it used to be.

Medicare - still around (expanded in fact, due to Bush's Part D)
SS OASI - still around
SS DI - still around
UI - still around
SNAP - still around
EIC - still around

Re:Ryan and Rand

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that the ones who breed most are the uneducated and the poor. Why? Because without a safety net you need kids to support you as you get older. And lots of them, because (a) some will leave and (b) if you're truly living in poverty some will die. Give people (particularly women) education and they are no longer dependent on physical labor to pay the bills, so they can work longer. Give them a safety net and they can feel moderately secure that they won't starve when they finally do retire - pressure to have lots of kids gone, so rates of reproduction also drop.

Personally if I was to build a conspiracy theory I would lean toward saying that the rich want people living in poverty and ignorance precisely because that's the best way to ensure a good supply of cheap, disposable, easily manipulated workers. Alternatively (and this reflects my actual belief) - there is no grand conspiracy, just an unfortunate collision of lobbying, toxic politics and stupid voters.

Re:Ryan and Rand

[Jeremi]

I think what you're missing is that those programs are still around despite the efforts of the Republican Party's Libertarian wing, and not for lack of trying, either.

Their main problem (in addition to the occasional opposition from the Democrats) is that many Republicans are retirement-age, or have children or grandchildren, and so when they realize that the "waste" that the Republicans are promising to cut is actually their own benefits, they rebel and put a quick stop to the proposed cuts. The libertarians are still working on a way to convince their Republican constituency that their draconian budget cuts will only hurt "other people", but they're running out of dog-whistles for that.

Re:Ryan and Rand

[Anonymous Coward]

cheap, disposable, easily manipulated personal servants

One thing I've noticed about the few very wealthy I've associated with is that have an absolute need for servants to order around.
Not all of them. The nouveau riche don't have that need so much. But the we're a dynasty types must have servants.

Re:Ryan and Rand

[zifn4b]

I think what you're missing is that those programs are still around despite the efforts of the Republican Party's Libertarian wing, and not for lack of trying, either.

Their main problem (in addition to the occasional opposition from the Democrats) is that many Republicans are retirement-age, or have children or grandchildren, and so when they realize that the "waste" that the Republicans are promising to cut is actually their own benefits, they rebel and put a quick stop to the proposed cuts. The libertarians are still working on a way to convince their Republican constituency that their draconian budget cuts will only hurt "other people", but they're running out of dog-whistles for that.

First of all, I think you're talking about a specific type of Libertarian. The core principle in Libertarianism is maximizing personal liberty. The type you're referring to is a minority in my experience.

Secondly, you and the GP, all you're really talking about is that the current economic system is broke with respect to the circumstances. In Capitalism especially the Keynesian flavor, it makes the assumption that Capitalism provides for infinite economic opportunity. That's the house of cards this whole economic system is built upon. What we're discovering is it can't keep up with population growth and it fell short on a lot of promises. That problem is also getting further exacerbated by innovation that is driving down the need for labor like robotics. There's no point in shooting holes in the current economic system endlessly because that's like shooting fish in a barrel. What we ought to focus on is if this is the wrong system for the circumstances, what then is the right system or a better system? If there answer is there is no better system, dark times truly lie ahead.

Re:Ryan and Rand

[RandyHill]

Dems have always fought means-testing, most social security money goes to the wealthiest part of our society (much of the elderly are high net worth individuals).

Meanwhile we just whistle past the graveyard as the governments share of the GDP is far higher than any time in our history and it piles up debt at an astounding rate for our children to pay (or default on).

Does Bill gates have dementia?

[BarbaraHudson]

taking care of elderly people or working with kids in schools -- jobs which humans are particularly well suited for.

Ever deal with someone with dementia? It's not pretty. It's exactly the sort of work that robots can handle better than humans.

Anti-technology riots?

[Optic7]

This story (or more accurately the trend that it is addressing) kinda worries me. Reading this, reading about the Luddites (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite), then thinking about political incompetence and societal inertia, I wonder what are the chances of general anti-technology riots if unemployment rapidly rose to, say, 30%-50% because of automation? Would they target only robots, or, more likely, anything and anyone related to automation? How about destruction of internet infrastructure and data centers? What else? Death to all programmers and IT people?

Re:Anti-technology riots?

[ChrisMaple]

This is what robotic weapons are for.

Re:Details that make sense

[hackwrench]

The problem is that there are a lot of people who don't own those robots and the people who do aren't all that sensitive to the problems of those people and aren't too unhappy to just sell to other people who also own robots.

Here's my future dream ...

[argee]

Free health care;
Late term abortion legal until age 8;
Generous guaranteed income;
Allow widespread use of killer robots by military;
Tax arab oil as it comes out of the ground over THERE;
(see above if they don't want to pay the tax);
Split the justice into PENAL and CORRECTIONS;
Allow dueling;
Allow for hunting of a rival IF you serve 5 years' first (but
the rival can kill you anytime);
If you are military, government worker; or on an entitlement,
such as Welfare, Food Stamps, etc. you don't get to VOTE
until you are off the system for, say, 5 years. (law enforcement
exempted, and military after 4 years in service);
A single woman can have an abortion, but if father does not
agree, then there is no child support due;
Illegal immigrants that are deported and then return, should
be executed;
All 2nd and up DUI's: Car is forfeit. Too bad if you have it
financed or borrowed from a friend; but,
Any person with a DUI, their license picture has a red background;
You kill someone while DUI, you get death penalty;
You sell a class A drug to a minor; death penalty;
All citizens (those that can vote), are required to have gun training;
Same sex unions are ok, and legally binding, but should NOT be
called "marriage";
If you sue someone, and lose, you pay yours and THEIR's legal bill.
There should be a national sales or consumption tax, NOT an
income tax;
A person 65 or over would not owe property tax on his primary residence;
An illegal alien needing health care is deported at the end of their care;
Companies hiring H1B workers need to put the job out for "bid" to make
sure the H1B person is needed and there is no alternative;
Companies owning factories overseas must pay a hefty import duty;
NAFTA and TPP need to be revised;
Trump's "wall" needs to have electrified wires, dogs, and autonomous
machine guns. Vultures become a protected species;

Raising your neighbor's taxes

[Kohath]

does not lower your own taxes. It never does. Government just finds something new to spend the money on. And the new money sink is never the thing you wanted.

Re:Raising your neighbor's taxes

[ChrisMaple]

The legislators of Massachusetts have voted themselves raises twice in the last year. They're getting about $200,000 a year now. That shouldn't be and need not be. Just cross the border into New Hampshire where legislators are paid $100 a year.

The thing no rational person wants is a Massachusetts legislator.

I have a better idea

[rossz]

Let's add a massive tax on companies that use contractors excessively because they want to avoid paying benefits.

Re:I have a better idea

[RandyHill]

I don't want a job or your benefits. You are advocating a tax on me, a contractor, that's going to lower my wages and make it harder for me to find work.

BS

[s.petry]

If your statement was true nobody would ever change status. Nobody would have retirement funds, nobody would work to purchase a newer bigger car, nobody would have children, nobody would take a better job, etc.. etc... After all, they only feel it and don't make effort.

Perhaps you were giving your own personal analogy. In that case, speak for yourself. Most people do all of the things I mentioned and then some.

Re:BS

[hackwrench]

Just because there is a little degree of exceptions doesn't make the observation invalid. There isn't much status change, after all. Most of it is inertia. Just because people aren't completely inert doesn't mean they aren't mostly inert.

Re:BS

[s.petry]

Little? Hah! The majority of people I have met save, get promoted, find better jobs, got married, had kids, lived in apartments and bought houses, purchased cars and better cars and better cars. Like I said, keep your personal anecdote to yourself. You are not the majority.

Re:BS

[hackwrench]

The majority of people you have met save a little, get promoted a little higher, find slightly better jobs, got married which improved their lives a little, had kids which improved their lives a little, lived in apartments and bought houses because shelter is an absolute necessity, purchased cars because transportation is also essential and slightly better cars.

Re:BS

[s.petry]

Oh, so you have some magical way of calculating that progress is no progress if it does not come in a big enough dose fast enough. Good grief, you fail.

Re:BS

[hackwrench]

Yeah, It's called comparing what is to what could be.

You do realize many jobs have no meaning

[radicimo]

Guess you've never heard of the phenomenon of bullshit jobs.

The issue is not that jobs used to have meaning and now they don't; most jobs in most periods have undoubtedly been staffed by people who would prefer to be doing something else. The issue is that too little of the recent gains from technological advance and economic growth have gone toward giving people the time and resources to enjoy their lives outside work.

http://www.economist.com/blogs...

Re:You do realize many jobs have no meaning

[ChrisMaple]

A full time job is 40 hours a week. That leaves 128 hours a week for people "to enjoy their lives outside work." We've already passed the point of diminishing returns; many people are willing to work a few additional hours in order to gain the advantages that more money brings.

For people who don't have to tend to their children every day, larger blocks of free time are useful. A work week of four 10-hour days or three 13-1/3 hour days wastes less time in commuting and provides larger blocks of time for major activities.

Here's what will work

[PPH]

First, drop tax rates. Maybe to 5% max. Next, make the tax a gross revenue tax (my state already levies one of these at a low rate). Finally, allow only one deduction: W-2 wages paid to US persons.

Declare BIll Gates a Robot

[Required Snark]

Then tax the crap out of him.

Problem solved.

What a craptastic idea....

[King_TJ]

Bill Gates.... how far you're fallen! Or maybe, Bill Gates ... your good fortune only struck once!
Whatever the deal is, he completely changed ever since he had to fight the Federal govt. over the monopolistic practices lawsuits.
Now, he just spouts off disturbing ideas and trite "predictions of the future of tech".

Taxing automation to slow down the speed of its utilization is really pretty much the equivalent of proposing, back when he wanted "a PC on every desktop", that it was all going way too fast, requiring heavy taxes on anyone using a personal computer. I mean otherwise? Look how many people the technology would put out of work, in ALL different fields!

As far as I'm concerned, technologies like A.I. have a *long* way to go to become viable. Everything we've been sold so far as "artificial intelligence" has NO intelligence at all! It's taken decades to get things to a state where you can give a computer a voice command and it understands your speech reliably enough not to be frustrating. And we've gotten pretty good at making computers speak without rambling in monotone. But these pieces just allow fakery ... personal assistants like Siri or Cortana. But they wouldn't even understand who is "mom" and who is "dad" in a family, or who your boss is, if you didn't tag it first in your contact list on your device!

All of this fear of robots taking all the jobs is nonsense. If we keep progressing as fast as possible, we've still got a L-O-N-G way to go. People are afraid of things like self-driving vehicles. And sure, that's disruptive. But that just happens to be ONE area where huge amounts of money are going into R&D to make it work. The tech you find in a Tesla or in a self-driving truck doesn't really translate to an ability to do anything else. It just knows how to make a wheeled vehicle follow the rules of a public road or highway and travel between points.

A whole lot of assembly work going on in today's factories is already automated. There's not THAT much more automation to do, and you get diminishing returns as you spend more money for more complex machinery to replace the last 100, last 50 and then last 25 workers in a particular facility. For example? I used to work for a place that heat-treated and finished various metals. They had automation for things like hammering a material into shape, so people didn't sit out in the shop with giant sledgehammers, banging on parts by hand anymore. But you still needed humans to inspect all the parts as they went through the ovens and baths, running "recipes" programmed into the systems. Almost like a gourmet chef, they had to make judgement calls during the middle of processes to see if a batch was turning out as intended or not. And sometimes, if something wasn't coming out right - they had to cancel things so more material wasn't wasted, before trying again. New customers or new orders were always asking for different things, so you needed humans to translate all of those requests into results. Automation would have been more complete in such a place if they only did specific things to specific parts, the same way every time. But that's not what people outsourced work to them for. (If it was that easy, places would just heat treat or finish the metals in-house!)

Equal opportunity

[stikves]

We can all say it is still possible to find jobs, and by working smart and learning new skills you can always make yourself useful, hence get a job.

In reality, there will be huge gaps for people. If someone over 40, with little learning capacity (not everyone has 160 IQ), is out of a job, he or she will have difficulty in finding a new one. We know from IT industry that it is even difficult for us. Yes I know, we can advance our career, start own consulting business. But there will still be many without the required (people) skills unable to find employment.

I cannot go so far to claim it is the responsibility of the company to feed us for the entirety of our lives. And I might have less sympathy to people who actually have capability to improve themselves, but did not so due to laziness. Nevertheless it is a burden on us, as the society, to be able to keep as many people productive as possible.

If we cannot find a replacement job to a later career person, or unable to provide adequate education to young people, it is and will be our problem.

Why "new employment"?

[wvmarle]

With all those robots taking over our jobs, why should we have to do any jobs in the first place? Shouldn't ongoing automation give us more free time instead?

It is a quite fundamental question no-one seems to ask. Why do we have such thing as employment? Is it to produce things for other people to use (which robots can do for us), or is it for other reasons entirely?

Jobs and employment for a way of distributing money - and with it, the goods and services produced by those people. Now robots may come in and can take care of some or most of that production.

Re:Why "new employment"?

[virtig01]

We are heading in that direction. Early 20th century economists predicted that due technological advancement, we'd all be working 15-hour weeks now. But that didn't happen.... partly because stuff was invented along the way that workers want, and they need money to get. Consumerism really took off post WWII.

But if you just consider basics (food, clothing, shelter), things have gotten a lot cheaper. Clothes are basically free now (not necessarily the ones you want). Considering the huge amount of food waste in the system, that's cheap or free too; lack of $0 distribution is a problem. And there are a lot of cheap places to live too, especially if you live at a higher-density like they did 100 years ago. And if everyone doesn't need to end up in NYC/SF for work. So we might in fact be able to have a very leisurely existence, if it wasn't for the consumerism and lifestyle inflation that's occurred for the last century.

Not that everyone will want a life like that. People will always want more than just the basics.

Re:Why "new employment"?

[wvmarle]

Not that everyone will want a life like that. People will always want more than just the basics.

Not stopping people from trying to get more than "just the basics". That's also the philosophy behind things like a basic income for all. The basics are covered - food, shelter, clothing, a little extra for entertainment - but for more you have to put some effort in it. That more, however, can be different for many people. Some want to go for more hikes which is basically free, others may want to collect vintage cars and will need to find a way to get the money for that, yet others like to start writing books or engage in painting. That can also very well be that "more than just the basics", it is something we can not do now, but when robots take over our jobs, maybe we can. But only if we're not going to look for other forms of employment to occupy our lives with, just to fulfil those basics, which is what Bill Gates is suggesting we do.

Re:Why "new employment"?

[AutodidactLabrat]

You forgot the single reason for Capitalism
MORE CAPITAL
And none of that happens unless the vast majority are desperately seeking just to survive while the dynastic inheritance class takes all gains for themselves.
Remember, no one ever invested on the theory the money would improve OTHER people's incomes.

Wasting time being a scribe isn't being productive

[raymorris]

> they want to be productive and make personal goals

"Working" as a scribe, copying books with pen and ink, isn't really being productive when the printer on the shelf can produce much better copies, much faster.

Scrubbing clothes against a washboard, pretending the washing machine doesn't exist, isn't being productive, it's wasting your time.

Sitting at a desk all day adding up columns of numbers is a wssting your time, given that a computer can get the job done a billion times faster, and with far fewer errors.

It is not productive to spend your time doing something a machine can do better and faster.

Productive work includes writing something interesting that will be printed out on the printer, or finding ways to save trees by reducing the need print and mail things (such as inventing the internet).

Internet is a robot too

[Max_W]

It took jobs of countless airline staff. Passengers, especially business class, do not have to fly to talk or view an object. After 2001 airline industry became different.

Also training courses, books, mail, etc. It is different now too.

Re:Sure

[ShanghaiBill]

Such as Microsoft, the company founded by Bill Gates, which has cheated the state of Washington out of billions of dollars in taxes by claiming that all of it's revenue comes from a tiny office in Nevada.

No. Microsoft never did that, because Washington state does not have either a personal or corporate income tax. They do have sales taxes, but that is based on purchases not revenue.

Having used Word 1.0

[rsilvergun]

the resulting lost productivity from that software constitutes enough write offs to cover 'ole Bill up until we've got replicators and a Star Trek economy.

You're not thinking it through either

[rsilvergun]

the point is the phase "Robot Tax". It's simple, easy to understand and feels good. We're not taxing Job Creators we're taxing those job stealing robots.

If you're interested in the welfare of the average citizens one of the most important things you need to figure out is how to get them to accept the help they so desperately need. To put it another way: Ayn Rand would have died homeless if a friend hadn't convinced her to accept Social Security.

What the devil are you on about?

[rsilvergun]

I think in your own rambling way you're trying to say that without the struggle for survival folks will fall to Ennui. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. There's plenty of things folks can do to amuse themselves. And 99% of us are just fine wearing the same cloths and watching the same things as everyone else. Have you checked what the top websites are lately? There's not that many of them.

You yell out loud that the Utopia can't exist but you haven't given a lick of evidence. Meanwhile I can point out that folks who are independently wealthy do just fine at finding stuff to do. People don't need to worry about where their next meal is coming from to be content. If they did the Netherlands would be a wasteland.

Re:We don't need more jobs.

[ChrisMaple]

Then you'll be able to afford to have someone teach you that the past tense of "pay" is "paid" -- but you'll be too lazy to learn it.

"Deserve" does not appear out of thin air, nor does it pop up because you breathe. To deserve something, you have to have earned it.

Re:Sure

[Imrik]

Washington state does have a B&O tax and a royalty tax that should both apply.

Re:Well done, capitalists.

[ChrisMaple]

Advocates of government (particularly big government) claim that government provides for the needs of the people. Robots don't have needs in the same way people do. Those tax dollars being lost by a human stopping working are tax dollars that aren't needed to provide to that human who will presumably go someplace he's wanted.

In any case, the alleged problem is just a house of cards. Take away the idea of government providing things for people and the whole silly structure collapses.

Not Sure How Post-Human-Worker Economy Will Work

[mentil]

I'm sure some kind of Universal Basic Income (UBI) or central planning/rationing system will be the endgame for our economy, once robots completely replace humans. However, I've been having trouble imagining a system that can easily scale to accommodate both 25% unemployment, and also (theoretical) 100% unemployment.

The primary problem is thus: under 100% automation and UBI, all goods/services are paid for with tax money. If a productivity/income tax on the robot/business that creates/sells a widget (respectively) equals less than 100% of the value of the widget, then private business will gradually siphon money from the human side of the economy, leading to deflation. OTOH, if tax equals 100% of the value then gross profit is impossible, making it impossible for the business to grow or pay off loans used to make it grow. As I see it, at this point, established businesses would have to be nationalized in order to avoid breaking the economy. Each person with a college degree could be given some resources to experiment with a pet project or two, but otherwise resources would be spent according to consumer demand. Give some nice bonus to those who have a successful new business/invention and then nationalize it; hey that sounds like how patents and copyright are supposed to work. However...

Central planning, nationalization and UBI aren't feasible/easy with 25% unemployment because ~25% of purchases will be with tax money, and so ~25% of GDP will need to go back into taxes. The 75% of employed people (and businesses) will pay 1/3 of their income on average, as tax (who wants to take bets that lobbying causes businesses to pay less than average). As the permanently unemployed increase in numbers, this portion paid as taxes will increase, encouraging people to quit their job and live off the UBI, leading to a runaway effect, even if automation isn't yet ready for 100% replacement of humans. There will be cases where there is a point where it is too expensive to hire a human yet there is no robot capable of doing their job. For example, if all your needs were taken care of with the UBI, would you work full time for $15k/year (2016 dollars) doing unpleasant drudgery if 75% of that were taken as tax?

I suppose one could say "well, as an economic revolution, of course there will be hard times during the transition" but who's going to vote for temporary hard times? People would rather hang on tight to the status quo, watching the inevitable train crash come straight towards them in slow motion. History bears this out, as explained e.g. in the novel Collapse.
I predict nothing will change until many years after the point at which a difficult change would have been less painful than trying to hang on.

Re:Not Sure How Post-Human-Worker Economy Will Wor

[Is Don the new Ron]

Ultimately the only good solution, if it's possible, is self-production. Give everybody the capability to produce everything they need. Yes, I'm talking about replicators. Anything short of that is just first aid for a dying patient. People would basically become islands or tribes onto themselves, trading only luxury goods they can do without, much like the beginnings of European trade with the aboriginal Americans, minus the exploitation and addiction that came later.

How about?

[ruir]

How about laws that outlaw trusts, foundations and country shifting schemes as a way to funnel money from the IRS? It would be a good start.

How many humans is a robot worth?

[ukoda]

While I have some sympathy for the idea I don't think it is practical. The first problem is how many humans does a given robot replace? For example one place I worked used a robot to apply glue to a plastic window on a product. This was not done for cost reasons, the task required a precise control over the amount of glue which was too difficult for a human to do. In this case the robot freed up about about 2 hours a day of a line worker's work load i.e. the robot had a human equivalent work output of about 1/4 of a human. On the other hand a large robot moving heavy items could be replacing 4 humans? Would it be fair to tax them at the same rate? The existence of such a tax would shape the design of the robots to minimise the tax per unit output. I see nothing but a complicated mess coming out of such an idea.

a machine tax

[prefec2]

This is an old request. It first was raised when automation eradicated jobs. However, it is good to see that even capitalists like Gates see that in the end we will not be able to avoid it. Unfortunately , this brings another question: What shall people do? If they have nothing to do, they go crazy.

How is that supposed to happen?

[johannesg]

You (and others) seem to believe that "robots" are clearly defined pieces of equipment, that clearly take over someone's job. Something with at least a sinister metallic arm that you can point to and say "that thing has my job!".

Reality is that work has been steadily mechanized over a course of centuries, and that process will continu. Instead of you doing your job with a machine, it will be a slightly smarter machine doing the work - and it may or may not have an arm. Where do you draw the line, precisely? How is a law going to define what a "robot" is and what isn't? Is an assembly line one robot, or a hundred? How about the robots in your house: are you going to pay taxes on your mixer, your bread maker, your oven, your fridge, etc.? How about your car, are you going to pay taxes on that as well? Each of those devices save a lot of work, and in doing so, replace human labor. Are we going to pay taxes for all of that?

If you wish to apply tax in terms of displaced human labour, will you compare with assembly line labour of a century ago, or fully manual labour of a millennium ago? How about robots in China, how will you tax those?

Re:How is that supposed to happen?

[mysidia]

Where do you draw the line, precisely?

The great thing is you don't have to draw lines. Eventually you categorize all kinds of businesses based on category, and you set a required percentage of Money spent on Labor per Dollar of revenue, Based on what those ratios were before additional automation was introduced ----- Also, you can set a 100-year's schedule to allow 0.5 percent points more of savings per year by automating.

It doesn't matter what kind of automation you used to reduce your Labor costs.
The amount of revenue your business generates dictates how much labor would be required if you were not automating.
And it's that disparity, or that decrease in Labor cost per $$$ of revenue which can be reversed by taxing 90% of the savings.

Also, setting a minimum labor cost per dollar of revenue based on a business activity has another advantage........
It reduces the incentive for companies to try and abuse their workers, get more interns, try and sneak more unpaid overtime,
or try and Offshore work, misuse contractors, Engage in destructive mergers and mass-layoffs.

Reducing the work force for any reason, lowering the wage costs will then have major tax consequences, unless business revenue also goes down and stops growing at the same time.

Re:How is that supposed to happen?

[johannesg]

So you draw the line "before _additional_ automation is introduced". Let's say I have a highly automated factory, and my competitor does not. If he introduces automation he gets to pay a massive tax that I don't - simply because I was earlier.

And do we count that "additional" automation from now? Or from 1980? Or from 1600? That's the line you are drawing. Where is the cutoff point?

Re:How is that supposed to happen?

[religionofpeas]

That's stupid. Imagine total economic output as a cake. Taxes can be used to redistribute the cake in a (hopefully) fair way. Robot workers and automation make the cake bigger. You should not use taxes as a mechanism to keep the cake small.

Re:How is that supposed to happen?

[Enigma2175]

But the problem is that with the current economic system a small number of people take most of the cake and put it in their cake vault, the workers get enough cake to survive on and some people get no cake at all. If robots can replace all the current workers then why would the owners of the robots give away any of their large stash of cake when they don't have to?

If the cake is large enough to feed everyone why are we making more cake? Just so the cake hoarders can put even more cake in their vaults?

Re:How is that supposed to happen?

[religionofpeas]

I have no problems with tax law modifications to make things fairer, and assure that everybody's got a good shot at surviving.

But if a robot can do the work more efficiently than a person, then we shouldn't try to stop it. Instead, let's find something else for the person to do. And if there's really nothing else (not very likely in the foreseeable future), then we redistribute some of the money in the least complicated fashion.

If the cake is large enough to feed everyone why are we making more cake?

Because there's still international competition for resources.

Re:How is that supposed to happen?

[w3woody]

Dude, you can't even reasonably calculate the number of man-hours that have been lost to air-powered hammers when used to frame a stick-and-nail framed house. Or the number of man-hours lost to power saws (over using a hand-saw). Or in other industries, the number of man-hours lost to software developers as we transitioned from punch cards to having our own desktop computers, or the number of man-hours lost as we transitioned to better IDEs which allow us to more quickly find and fix problems in our software.

Or take the production of films. Can you reasonably calculate the number of man-hours lost when movie makers transitioned from cellulose film stock to using Red cameras and an all-digital production process?

And part of the reason why you cannot say what has been lost is because two things happen when automation takes people's jobs. Prices for a thing go down, but also, money is available to expand the offerings we get. Houses get bigger. Software gets more complex and more intricate. Movies contain more special effects and become "grander" and on a larger scale.

The real problem I have with the reasoning used by those who assume increased productivity (which is what "robots" give us) is that they assume, like Charles Duell's apocryphal quote from 1899 presumes, that everything that can be invented has been invented, and that life will continue on pretty much the same, with the same offerings, same products, same goods and services--but just with fewer people doing them. It's zero-sum thinking--and from an economics perspective, zero-sum thinking has been the source of pretty much most of the evils of the past century.

Re:How is that supposed to happen?

[w3woody]

I'm wondering how much IBM should be taxed for introducing Eclipse, which made Java programmers more productive. I mean, if I can produce code twice as fast in Eclipse than I can in a command-line editor like 'ed', should IBM be forced to pay a tax equivalent to my income tax because I downloaded their software?

Re:How is that supposed to happen?

[mysidia]

Let's say I have a highly automated factory, and my competitor does not. If he introduces automation he gets to pay a massive tax that I don't - simply because I was earlier.

No.... That would not be fair. If your two factories are building the same kinds of products, your two operations will be assigned The same required ratio of Wage costs to business Revenue.
For example: Take 10 factories producing the same general category of consumable good.
If their average overall company labor cost across all employees was $Y for each $X of revenue attributable to that business, then take Y and divide it by X to reach the Required fraction. Average the required fraction over a representative sample of businesses in that industry for the years 2005 to 2010.

Then set that fraction as The required fraction of labor cost per Unit of revenue generated by every factory in that same industry.

So you see: It's not "measure automation for your individual companies"; It's Measure the average human labor cost of a Dollar of Revenue throughout your entire industry. And determine appropriate amounts based on measurement Over a period of time before rampant automation started to cause economic problems for workers.

Once the IRS Labor cost per Revenue tables are generated for this kind of factory, then it applies Equally to ALL businesses in the industry, Regardless of what level of automation they were at in 2010.

Re:How is that supposed to happen?

[mysidia]

Robot workers and automation make the cake bigger. You should not use taxes as a mechanism to keep the cake small.

My proposition is this cannot be true. The cake is made bigger when companies invest in human labor and put in economic output an amount comparable to what they take in.

When companies decide to stop investing in human labor as much as possible and hire robots instead, In other words, maximize dollars that come in and don't leave as economic output, in the extreme case take in massive $$$ and spend No money to produce products worth (In terms of cost) a tiny fraction of what is paid, this means they have found a way to horde more of the cake, and there's no increase in the size of the cake associated with these actions.

What I suggest is essentially an Efficiency limit. a Minimum amount of money companies have to invest in labor capital, A ratio of required labor per Dollar of revenue emitted, Requiring companies to be economically productive, both in terms of the value of goods produced, and the value of services consumed, and not be able to just horde cake Or produce something from nothing.

Re:How is that supposed to happen?

[liquid_schwartz]

While the Soviets failed there is merit to exploring alternatives. As the world is closing in human labor being needed less and less while still meeting most human needs the current system really begins to fall apart. Moreover, most billionaires are not active or "providing value" anyway. Personally I favor a graduated wealth tax with *no shelters* as well as a graduated capital gains tax. Seems sporting that the rich pay taxes as well as the middle class. The poor, as always, will get a free ride.

Re:How is that supposed to happen?

[mysidia]

Dude, you can't even reasonably calculate the number of man-hours that have been lost to air-powered hammers when used to frame a stick-and-nail framed house.

Which is why I suggest finding a "Percentage of gross revenue which must be cost of Wages that withholding taxes will be due upon" for the purposes of deciding what the Automation tax will be. Instead of trying to directly count Man hours gained or lost.

Also, if Automation lowers prices, then revenues will go down. If more total work gets done by the business as a result of automation, then the tax will also become negligible, because the increase in revenue will be Offset by more work being required.

Re: How is that supposed to happen?

[w3woody]

Read my whole comment. Because in our world of increasing automation some things got more expensive, not less--but the also got corresponding far more complex. Like the cell phone in your pocket which is several orders of magnitude more complex. Without automation ranging from better IDEs to automation in assembling the printed circuit boards, the modern smart phone would not be possible.

Re:How is that supposed to happen?

[Your.Master]

Your thesis seems to confuse economic input and economic output. If a company is producing the same products or services, but doing so with fewer humans and more robots, it has identical economic output. There's no such thing as being economically productive in terms of the value of services consumed. That's being economically consumptive and it is a necessarily evil, not something to promote. When you arbitrarily increase economic consumption, that means nobody else can consume that economic output. Not another productive company or individual, for one, and also not unproductive individual concerns like leisure activity which always gets a little ignored in these discussions as though that weren't the whole point of all this.

If the robots can do the same thing materially better than humans (as they often can today, especially in rote manufacturing tasks, which is the entire reason this has been done), then switching to robots has increased economic output. The possible negative downside you are looking for is it might change the economic distribution, which is exactly what the tax plan proposes to address.

An efficiency limit is, by the very definition of efficiency, an attempt to make the cake smaller; an attempt to reduce economic output. Efficiency in economic production is basically always good (provided you are properly capturing externalities -- the usual counterexample is increasing efficiency by polluting the river etc. which is not good but is also not truly efficient when you take everything into account).

I don't think a per-robot tax is they way to do it but it's strictly better than what you're suggesting, because what you could equivalently do is distribute all the "wages" that would have gone to humans, to some lucky other humans that don't have to do any labour for it whatsoever, in the same proportion as before. Now the economic output is the same/higher and the distribution is the same, but humans get to either do some other economic activity or leisure activities instead of doing the job of a machine. That's better for everybody -- for the rich CEO, for the newly hired kid, for the single mother with a disabled child at home, the consumers down the line; everybody wins (or at least, doesn't lose) in that model. That's almost the same model you proposed, because it's still an efficiency limit, but it doesn't impose the requirement to invest in labour capital it imposes the requirement to invest in humans regardless of labour. Your objection to producing something from nothing is especially bewildering because in economic terms that's what labour is.

I do think that as time goes on, the economy will have to be restructured to accommodate all of this change and get to what right now appears as a utopia, but will inevitably just be the new normal for people born into that world. And I think that's a good thing.

I'm going to make a statement that is controversial: human labour is a bad thing, and therefore job creation is a bad thing although job creation has been generally a tradeoff that was worth it most of the time in living memory. There's two forms of job creation / job destruction: jobs created because of new economic activity, where the job creation is a necessary evil; and jobs created by the broken window fallacy -- totally useless make-work like paying one person to dig a ditch and another person to fill it in; or paying a human to do job that a robot could fulfill at least as well. For a long time, people focused on the first of those and praised job creation there because that was driving massive economic improvements in both the first and third world, for much of the 20th century at least. But some people are so into the cult of job creation that they are supporting the second like the luddites of old.

I would want the tax base to encourage overall economic efficiency -- which means, yes, robots replacing our jobs, but they're still taxing the ultimate beneficiaries using some monotonically nondecreasing income/tax curve (

Re:How is that supposed to happen?

[toddestan]

Really? From what I can see, the new stick houses around here are still nailed together. Really, the basic construction hasn't changed much in a 100 years.

Maybe the pre-fab stuff, but I'm under the impression a lot that uses steel and is probably riveted together.

Re:How is that supposed to happen?

[RespekMyAthorati]

And if there's really nothing else (not very likely in the foreseeable future),

For tens of millions in the US (and hundreds of millions around the world) there is nothing else right now.

Automation = Automation, software or robots

[DutchDopey]

Gates, having made millions of jobs lost through software was never an issue, but now its robots taxes should be payed. I think taxes are a bad method either way, but this is very hypocritical.

Impossible

[Baki]

How would you calculate the "amount of automation" that would be the basis of taxation?!?

I think Bill Gates sees the problem with automation: 90-99% of us will be without work.
What he doesn't see: this will mean that the economic system as we've known it for about 200 years now, will cease to exist.

The current elites and rich want to cling to the status quo, obviously, and come up with weird ideas that are wishful thinking IMHO.

I think the company, whose economic function is to organize work at a larger scale, might have to change fundamentally.
A single person + an army of software/robots could replace entire 10000+ companies one day.

Mmmmh

[nospam007]

"Bill Gates: The Robot That Takes Your Job Should Pay Taxes "

I wonder what he would said in his Microsoft days, when somebody had suggested Microsoft should pay taxes for every Office packet because millions of typists were laid off.

Re:Mmmmh

[unixisc]

I think he's just bitter that the robots typically run BSD or one of those microkernel OSs like QNX, and not Windows 10

On the money

[golodh]

Mr. Gates is probably on the money.

Just consider this: in today's society a significant proportion of people (US citizens) are out of work. It's not that they are useless trash ... but by and large they're not worth the wages they need to support a normal life. The labour market has determined that they are surplus to requirements.

The reasons they are discarded vary.

Mostly it's competition from within. Companies always shop for the best price performance ratio. In production machinery, printers, staples, and employees. So they sort applicants and current workers by price-performance ratio, and try to make their workforce structure resemble as much as possible the optimum available in the job market. Through hire and fire policy. Maintaining that "best match" with the labour market is the main reason companies have an HR department. No hard feelings, just business.

Competition can also come from outside though. Examples are H1B visa and illegal immigrants from Mexico. Please note that there could never have been any issue whatsoever with illegal immigrants if employers weren't prepared to employ undocumented applicants. But they are ... because it benefits them directly. H1B immigrants are the clearest example of people being selected on basis of their cost/benefit ratio that I know of.

Approximately the same holds for automation. Throughout the ages, as technology advanced people were expelled from one type of function (e.g. agriculture, manufacturing, mining) and had to seek employ in another function (farmers becoming labourers, labourers going to work in the service industries, etc.). An example is the industrial revolution. Historically that has led to a massive shift in the job market (farming to industry), unemployment, a large drop in wages, terrible working conditions, misery, and widespread exploitation of people by employers. Society finally regained its equilibrium after a century or so, in part due to the threat of revolution.

The only difference is that the current technology is poised to make certain groups of people uneconomical to employ. It's not just that their jobs disappear, it's jobs of the kind they are capable of doing become prone to being automated.

Take the 6 mln. or so truckers.we have now. We can replace one third of them with self-driving trucks, at huge benefits. Now what other work would somebody who likes being a trucker be good at? Not sitting indoors and shuffling paper I suppose.

Take the car industry. Plants today are highly robotised. Cheaper, better, more flexible. More automobile workers surplus to requirements. What type of work would they be good at? What kind of work are they trained for?

Take scores of people in administrative functions like the insurance industry. Doing administration and processing claims can increasingly be done by software. AI or not. Lets replace them. Miners (remember those hopeful Trump voters in mining villages) are on the way out because coal is being pushed out of the market and not coming back.

Take ready made products. Those can be made far cheaper abroad and then shipped to the US. Despite the little temper tantrums by Pres. Trump and his supporters it's not economically feasible for the US to stop that. Other economies would overtake the US and start dominating it. So it's probably not going to happen to any meaningful degree for any meaningful length of time.

The list of labour displacing developments goes on. And on.

All this wouldn't be a problem if we could readily think of other (paid !) work we could let the freshly turned-surplus-to-requirements workers do. But can we? Really?

I don't see it and I'm no longer optimistic we will think of something genuinely new.

In any event, we have limited options to respond.

We could delay or even *temporarily) halt the economic mechanisms that push workers into the surplus bin. And cut our own throat, economically speaking.

We could simply tell

Re:On the money

[LienRag]

Note that one perk of putting a lot of people on unemployment benefits (once you get rid of the sadistic obligation to still look for a job that doesn't exist) is that they can go where life is cheap and nice, not stay clogged in bad cities...
Which means that the overall cost isn't that expensive.

I say

[SpaghettiPattern]

Any corporation abusing its monopoly should compensate their victims. And gained market share should be relinquish.

The current economic system becomes irrelevant

[zifn4b]

This is just more evidence that the current economic system is going to need to radically change with the advent of mass robotic automation. Taxing robots is like saying we need to take this new technological advance and shoe horn it into an existing system that is becoming antiquated. That's complete nonsense. Let me put this in perspective, let's take something that tax dollars pay for, I don't know like highways. If we automate that type of labor with robotics we don't need as much tax dollars for that right? Because we don't have to pay the robots. What we really ought to be doing is looking at how robotic automation affects everything not just the private sector. We need to dig into the details to see what the most rational, pragmatic thing is to do before we have knee-jerk reactions like "robots should pay taxes". Bill Gates is a smart man. It's quite possible he presented this idea not because he thought it made sense but to at least get people thinking about the issue more seriously.

They are already taxed

[ET3D]

Replacing workers with robots reduces costs and increases profits, which are taxed. If governments reduced the amount of tax holes in their laws, they'd even get these taxes. If they don't, the big corporations would still manage to avoid the new tax while the little companies who want some automation will suffer.

Re:They are already taxed

[JustNiz]

No one in the government wants to fix the tax loopholes, because they are all (ab)using them. There's a reason that new tax legislation is always written in such a vague way.

Oh great

[Ulfilas2000]

So now I have to send in tax forms to pay the government for the missing tax money that my tax software saved over hiring an accountant, another tax form for the copy editor I no longer need to hire now that I have a spellchecker, a tax form for the musicians who no longer need to perform in my lobby now that I have streaming Pandora? Just think of all the trees!

Re:tax profit yes but not to slow automation - ?

[Ulfilas2000]

Unemployable? Do you think that what people do has to fit into a predetermined set of boxes simply so that the High School guidance counselors know how to orient young minds? Where does your 'must fit in square peg' mentality originate?

YES! Tax the Microsoft Word

[qazwsx]

Microsoft Word is a kind of robot that takes the jobs of the secretaries.
We have to have the secretaries back!

Adapt or die

[RogueWarrior65]

Should we subsidize the people who used to make bogus weight-loss machines? How about the people who used to make now-banned products? Bill Gates has become an ivory-tower moron.

Re:tax profit yes but not to slow automation - ?

[Registered Coward v2]

Unemployable? Do you think that what people do has to fit into a predetermined set of boxes simply so that the High School guidance counselors know how to orient young minds? Where does your 'must fit in square peg' mentality originate?

Nice attack that did not address my comment. As some one who escaped the box a high school guidance counselor defined for me, abnd seen friends do the same, I understand the ability of individuals to achieve. I've also seen friends struggle as their jobs went away. However, if automation eliminates many jobs there is a segment of the population that will be come unemployable, especially at a level that currently supports a middle class lifestyle. We are already seeing that in manufacturing as factories become automated, not everyone can be retrained to be a programmer or some other job that pays as well as what they currently do. Unless we accept that as a by product of automation and find a way to deal with it, which includes revamping our educational system, we are in for rough times. Trump's election will only be a foreshadowing of the class warfare to come. So you can either accuse the messanger of being some sort of elitist or work towards a solution; IMHO the later is a more productive course.

Re:Futurama!

[Highdude702]

I would love to be Bender. That would be fucking awesome!

Basic logic failures

[s.petry]

think in your own rambling way you're trying to say that without the struggle for survival folks will fall to Ennui. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

That is quite amazing considering you said it, I didn't. Were you going for reductio ad absurdum?

You yell out loud that the Utopia can't exist but you haven't given a lick of evidence.

Fallacy, claim that I need to prove non-existence. You say it's possible, you need to prove it. We only have a few thousand years of Governments and Societies to pick through to find one. Just one.

Meanwhile I can point out that folks who are independently wealthy do just fine at finding stuff to do.

And exactly how did they get independently wealthy? Sitting around smoking pot all day? Parents who similar sat around smoking pot all day? I know, they all won a lottery right? Your personal anecdote is worse than useless unless you answer how they got to be "independently wealthy".

If they did the Netherlands would be a wasteland.

So since people never died the whole world can live off of the Government tit? There are only two options and nothing in between? Or is it more likely that the people who are ambitious and work hard help to support the lower end of the spectrum? Yeah, you don't do critical thinking.

Taxing Robots

[Residentcur]

I agree with this, but not with the motive to slow deployment. Most jobs lost to robots will inevitably occur. We need a way to monetize this in the event it becomes clear that people don't have to work in order to exist. Explore combining it with one of the various proposals for guaranteed annual incomes. [paragraph] If a job can be done by a robot, humans who do that job will eventually no longer find it rewarding.[paragraph] We will either have to eliminate much of the human population, or find a good way to allow them to survive and prosper without needing to contribute to the workforce. Those who aspire to more will always find a way; those who do not should not have to live miserable existences. This is a longstanding belief.

5th Grade reading?

[s.petry]

No offense, but this used to be assigned reading in 5th grade in the US.

Re:5th Grade reading?

[dryeo]

Glad to hear it though I'd guess that you actually mean it was required reading in your State.

The Robot That Takes Your Job ...

[sproketboy]

Should be the one to terminate you. That's how Arnold would do it.

Bill Gates and robot taxes

[nudibranchOne]

Is this to slow down the use of robots or to help fund the government and pay pensions?

Re:We don't need more jobs.

[AutodidactLabrat]

Unless you are a Trump class inheritor, and you "Deserve" 3.2 billion of OTHER PEOPLE'S WORK
Gained by refusing to pay as promised in contracts.

What a dumbass

[ebvwfbw]

The whole reason they're going to robots is because they can't afford wages because they keep raising them. Everything goes up, businesses go out of business. Increasing the minimum wage hurts minorities and teenagers. We know that. This will just help things implode faster.

Better yet, just send me the robots paycheck

[buckminster_futt]

then I can sit home, brew beer, smoke dope, read /., watch porn all day. Wait, I'm retired. I do that already. Oh well, forget it...just send me hookers who play blackjack. And brew beer!

Better idea

[Magius_AR]

How bout you tax the politicians that voted to pass the minimum wage law that made your job too costly?