Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Does that include WYSIWYG word processing software that put all those typesetters out of work? Bill, you owe some back taxes.
Exactly the reverse should happen. Prices have to be driven down. Nobody is going to pay the tax but us.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
That's his whole point. He's arguing for slowing down automation so that everyone doesn't lose their jobs all at once.
Sounds fine. The robot's salary is $0. 25% tax of $0 is $0.
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.
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.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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)
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.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
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.
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.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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".
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.
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.
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?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Let's add a massive tax on companies that use contractors excessively because they want to avoid paying benefits.
-- Will program for bandwidth
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.
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...
100 REM PISS OFF CODE FASCISTS 200 GOTO 100
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!)
"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.
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.
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.
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:
When the organization is unable to communicate information well enough and fast enough to and from the central decision makers, central authority collapses
When the data necessary to make adequate decisions exceeds the ability of the central authority to gather and store it, the central authority collapses.
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.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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?
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.
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
What about value-added tax in places where it exists? Surely the unpaid robots create added value in course of their operation.
Ezekiel 23:20