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'Robots Won't Just Take Our Jobs -- They'll Make the Rich Even Richer' (theguardian.com)
Robotics and artificial intelligence will continue to improve -- but without political change such as a tax, the outcome will range from bad to apocalyptic, writes technology and politics journalist Ben Tarnoff, citing experts and studies, for The Guardian. From the article, shared by six anonymous readers: Despite a steady stream of alarming headlines about clever computers gobbling up our jobs, the economic data suggests that automation isn't happening on a large scale. The bad news is that if it does, it will produce a level of inequality that will make present-day America look like an egalitarian utopia by comparison. The real threat posed by robots isn't that they will become evil and kill us all, which is what keeps Elon Musk up at night -- it's that they will amplify economic disparities to such an extreme that life will become, quite literally, unlivable for the vast majority. A robot tax may or may not be a useful policy tool for averting this scenario. But it's a good starting point for an important conversation. Mass automation presents a serious political problem -- one that demands a serious political solution. Automation isn't new. In the late 16th century, an English inventor developed a knitting machine known as the stocking frame. By hand, workers averaged 100 stitches per minute; with the stocking frame, they averaged 1,000. This is the basic pattern, repeated through centuries: as technology improves, it reduces the amount of labor required to produce a certain number of goods. So far, however, this phenomenon hasn't produced extreme unemployment. That's because automation can create jobs as well as destroy them. What's different this time is the possibility that technology will become so sophisticated that there won't be anything left for humans to do. What if your ATM could not only give you a hundred bucks, but sell you an adjustable-rate mortgage?
"By hand, workers averaged 100 stitches per minute; with the stocking frame, they averaged 1,000. This is the basic pattern, repeated through centuries: as technology improves, it reduces the amount of labor required to produce a certain number of goods. So far, however, this phenomenon hasn't produced extreme unemployment."
Yes, it did. Automatic steam-powered weaving machines caused the birth of the Union movement, because hundreds of thousands lost their jobs worldwide.
Just nobody cared at the time and the rich did get richer then as well.
. . . . they'll take err jerbs ???
(sorry, couldn't resist. . .)
Or we could just up corporate taxes and accept that full-time long-term employment in many sectors is a thing of the past.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Well, then I'd tell the ATM to go fuck itself, since adjustable rate mortgages are a scam, then I'd go find a different ATM that would sell me a fixed rate mortgage.
The first ATM would of course end up needing a machine-government bailout because it's too big to fail.
will mean our city will be ten foot deep in manure in less than a quarter century!
Alarmists need to stop thinking any one thing can be extrapolated to the future without society and technology changing and adapting. And no, tax as an attempt to slow or stall inevitable progress is not a solution at all.
That's the problem: That doesn't work this time around.
Back when agriculture was modernized so that we didn't need 70+ percent of the workforce in the production of food anymore, the people that worked on the fields before moved to the towns and worked in factories, and farmhands became factory workers. When factories started to modernize and automatize, people went into services and factory workers became waiters and salespeople.
The problem is that now we're replacing these people and there isn't anything they could move towards. There is no new sector opening that would hoover up that free workforce this time.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If the vast majority of humanity becomes unemployed (which is what this apocalyptic scenario implies), then no one will be buying the products that these robots make. Without customers and the money/purchasing they bring, businesses tend to collapse fairly quickly. You could counter with "well, the rich will just buy stuff from each other", but 1) the scale won't be there to justify the automation in most cases, and 2) in economics, just like in biology, when the genetic pool gets too small for a species, the result eventually becomes extinction.
Look, I get it, but honestly, this is the same argument that was being advanced 100 years ago when electricity was automating things (and 'OMG that Westinghouse guy is going to have more money than a god while the rest of us starve!'), 200 years ago when steam was automating things, etc etc. People have always adapted, shifted their career focus, and created new industries which are not as easily automated. Unless someone can come up with an argument showing how this time will be different (hint: it probably won't), then this is just a rehash of an old argument.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
So asked the farmhand back two hundred years, who will drive those machines that mow your fields and harvest your potatoes? You cannot get rid of me!
True. we still need one person to drive that machine.
Instead of thousands harvesting by hand.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The CBO produced a report "THE INCIDENCE OF THE CORPORATE INCOME TAX" in which it states "A corporation may write its check to the Internal Revenue Service for payment of the corporate income tax, but that money must come from somewhere: from reduced returns to investors in the company, lower wages to its workers, or higher prices that consumers pay for the products the company produces."
And it goes on to say
"Although economists are far from a consensus about exactly who bears how much of the burden of the corporate income tax, the existing studies highlight the significant types of economic mechanisms as well as the empirical estimates necessary for further quantifying the burdens. CBO's review of the studies yields the following conclusions:
o The short-term burden of the corporate tax probably falls on stockholders or investors in general, but may fall on some more than on others, because not all investments are taxed at the same rate.
o The long-term burden of corporate or dividend taxation is unlikely to rest fully on corporate equity, because it will remain there only if marginal investment is not affected by those taxes. Most economists believe that the corporate tax system has some effect on investment decisions.
o Most evidence from closed-economy, general-equilibrium models suggests that given reasonable parameters, the long-term incidence of the corporate tax falls on capital in general.
o In the context of international capital mobility, the burden of the corporate tax may be shifted onto immobile factors (such as labor or land), but only to the degree that the capital and outputs of different countries can be substituted.
o In the very long term, the burden is likely to be shifted in part to labor, if the corporate tax dampens capital accumulation.
The rich have tanks and A-10s. A big difference between now and 1789 is the disparity in weaponry between the kings and the peasants.
I comment occasionally so that I can mod others -1 overrated or -1 offtopic.
The rich are spending billions to kill off unions by a combination of (legally) bribing politicians, and propping up plutocrat-kissing pundits like Fox News, Rush, and Breitbart to convince the voting population that unions kill jobs and the economy.
The rich are winning the class war because they can buy more and bigger weapons.
Table-ized A.I.
Robot tax is infeasible, as it is too easy to work around. For example, as an owner of fully autonomous factory I would have a single employee press 'Start' button once a day, and sit in the chair in front of dials Homer-style. Now I can claim that my system isn't fully automated and I don't have to pay tax.
Feasible solution is progressive taxation combined with guaranteed income. Fundamentally, it isn't 1% getting Ferengi-rich, it is that the rest of us are forced to play Jem'Hadar as a result.
Only in this scenario you are the ox...
Here's the evidence: nobody can identify the new fields that are replacing the old ones, unlike the past. Sure, there are new fields, but they not appearing in sufficient quantity to replace those lost. And even those fields are being offshored to cheap-labor countries.
For example, craigslist employs about 60 people, but has probably killed tens or hundreds of thousands of newspaper-related jobs in the process.
Table-ized A.I.
...thinking you are entitled to be the one to sell me an adjustable-rate mortgage. It doesn't need selling if I already know what I want. It is not enough to produce something... you must produce something of value. Full stop. Articles like this give me the sense that the author is irritated by the fact that status quo isn't good enough. There is plenty of work to do, it just might not be the work you are accustomed to doing, and arguments like this have been debunked over and over again. The cotton gin obviated a lot of jobs, but people rose up and did more sophisticated work. Computers obviated a lot of jobs, but people rose up and did more sophisticated work. Robots and AI will obviate a lot of jobs, and people will still rise up and do more sophisticated work. The moral of the story here is get up off your lazy ass and do more sophisticated work. We've not yet begun to reach our potential as a race.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Already covered in Marshall Brain's book "Manna".
The real problem is not the robots. It's the humans.
If you use robots to further your greed, then yes, the rich get richer. If you use robots to help out humanity, surprise! They help out humanity. (It should be noted that Manna actually has a form of Universal Basic Income which is used to manage resources).
I see plenty of trash to pick up on the roadsides, landscaping that could be better tended, public spaces that could use more frequent cleaning and maintenance, infrastructure that could be better maintained, planets that need exploring and colonization... I don't think we actually lack for things to do, just the will to do them.
No, because the simulation was already capable of rendering whatever solution the genetic algorithm generated. Therefore the genetic algorithm and the simulation contained more information than the solution generated by them, and they are therefore more complex. What we're talking about would be more like the genetic algorithm determining that the simulation it used to determine how well a solution performed was incorrect and writing a new simulation to tests its results against.
so basically, you're expecting deflation. That'll be... fun...
You're also assuming that this new sector which will be hard to just automate from the get-go will nevertheless be feasible for existing service workers to pick up and perform - essentially, it must be based in something that's easy for the ordinary human but hard for a robot. Any ideas? Personally, the only thing I can see that may meet both of those qualifications is artistic creation. (Which puts me in mind of Melancholy Elephants, by Spider Robinson...) Better crank those art classes back up in elementary school.
Didn't you hear? Corporate taxes are eeeeeevil.
Actually, in many ways, they are. Corporate taxes are often seen as a way to make fat cats pay. But the opposite is true: corporate taxes tend to be regressive. If you tax a corporation, the money comes from some combination of shareholders, customers, and employees. The biggest shareholders are pension funds, holding the savings of middle class works. Big companies tend to make goods, while small companies provide services. So if you tax big companies, the tax burden is shifted to goods (disproportionately purchased by the poor) rather than services (disproportionately purchased by the rich). Corporate taxes also have pernicious side effects, such as pushing investment and jobs overseas.
If you want to target the rich, it is much better to make individual income taxes more progressive, rather than trying to do it indirectly by taxing corporations.
What you're missing is that AI and automation is advancing to be GENERALLY more effective and more cost-effective than people's labour, GENERALLY, as in, across very wide swaths of potential tasks. That implies a profoundly changed game, and as far as automation vs humans, it will be zero-sum, because for just about any job category, the automation/AI will be the more effective and cost-effective hence market-selected option.
A lot of people don't seem to get that this crossing point (automation > human capability) is coming soon (and in many sectors has already come).
Individually, and in society and political culture, we have to GROK this, then go through the usual stages of grief:
Denial – The first reaction is denial. In this stage individuals believe the diagnosis is somehow mistaken, and cling to a false, preferable reality.
Anger – When the individual recognizes that denial cannot continue, they become frustrated, especially at proximate individuals.
Bargaining – The third stage involves the hope that the individual can avoid a cause of grief.
Depression – "I'm so sad, why bother with anything?";
Acceptance
And then, after not too long a grieving pause, we need to come up with real solutions (as contrasted with keeping the Mexicans, Chinese, and Indians out, which are misguided FAKE solutions.)
At the core of a real solution will be us reconceptualizing what people are here for and where we should get our self-worth.
At the core of a real solution needs to be fair and adequate ways of distributing the proceeds of a substantially automated economy.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
There is a new Sector emerging, the Unemployed and Underemployed. What could possibly go wrong?
I don't see "the rich" becoming richer as a problem. If poor people are becoming poorer, in absolute terms, then we have a problem. I don't see that happening, however, since increased robotic productivity should normally (free of government interference) result in more abundant goods and services, raising the living standard for everyone. Sure, the rich will reap most of the gains, but that is because they own the robots.
So, what is the solution? Pretty straightforward, actually: own the robots! As luck would have it, we live in an age in which it has never been easier for anyone to invest in the future. This implies, of course, that people are smart enough to forego buying that luxury condo and partying away their paycheck in favor of planning for the day that that paycheck won't be there any more. I admit, I may be assuming too much about the average person's capacity for delayed gratification.
Might makes right irrelevant.
Numbers mean nothing.
Let's make it where people can spend their time tending public spaces, working basic infrastructure projects, or maintenance, or interesting high tech endeavors and have assurance of a decent place to live, raise a family, food and medical care. I don't give a damn what numbers you put on the scenario - provide for shelter, security, and well-being in exchange for tending to something that needs doing. If nothing needs doing, great - just don't take away people's shelter, security and well-being because somebody fucked up the quarterly forecast again.
If there's stuff that needs doing that nobody is interested in or apparently qualified to do, break out the incentives - higher pay, better benefits, lower working hour demands, whatever floats the boats to get qualified people to pick up those tasks instead of tending the local park garden.
What if your ATM could not only give you a hundred bucks, but sell you an adjustable-rate mortgage?
Some people take so long at the ATM I wonder WTF they are doing - international banking, hostile takeover - what, What, WHAT? Jesus! So please don't give the banks any more ideas for ATM functions.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Turn up your sarcasm detector, it looks like you've got it set to negative gain.
First, the majority of Americans didn't even vote in the Trump-Clinton election, 580 million people live in North America, 420 million more in South America, just under 130 million Americans voted in the election, and, as you point out, only 45.9% of them voted for the Trumpinator - so, I read the 2016 election as a "thumbs up" from roughly 6% of the American population in favor of Trump's image and policies. I'd wager much more than 7% of Americans would have voted against him, given the chance.
I used to work in small companies, where response to government oversight seemed like a huge burden on top of whatever it was we were trying to do. Now I work in a larger corporation where well over half of our resources are devoted to satisfying government oversight requirements - entire departments full of people who do nothing else, and all the other departments spend significant amounts of their time serving the needs of the regulatory departments. Oversight is necessary, and I think with strong transparency requirements the burden could actually be lessened, but it's no joke that we're already employing a huge number of people who do nothing but document and audit how other people work.
If the AI/automation revolution actually happens then labor will no longer have any income on which to pay tax. For some time, productivity gains have accrued with capital and labor has gotten the short end of the stick. This is a bug in capitalism but we have largely worked around the bug through progressive taxes and inheritance taxes. However, if AI and automation replace all labor then capital no longer has a reason to keep labor around. Since the people with a lot of capital largely control the government don't expect any help from that quarter.
In the past automation has made people more efficient and enabled many new jobs to come into being. This time it's different, formerly automation replaced our muscles and we moved from manufacturing economies to service economies and let the automation largely do the manufacturing work. This time, the robots will be replacing our brains rather than our muscles and there won't be service jobs to switch to. More and more people will lose their jobs and be unable to find new ones while capital continues to increase their hold on the available money and power, creating a feedback loop where all capital ends up with a small portion of the population. Unless we do something now (while labor still has some power) we are unlikely to stop this from happening.
Enigma
The way corporate profits and taxes are handled in the first place should be completely refactored.
100% of corporate profits should be paid as dividends, with automatic reinvestment of those dividends in the corporation (at a rate settable by each shareholder, defaulting to 100% reinvestment) in exchange for a greater share of the company (compared to those who opt not to reinvest).
Dividends are taxable, so the investors pay the tax, each at their own marginal tax rate (so small investors with meager incomes trying to save for retirement aren't taxed out the wazoo, but if some one individual personally owns vast swaths of the productive economy, they are).
Don't tax the corporation itself at all, because all of its profits are already being taxed at the shareholder level.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
A basic income plus a flat income tax with no exceptions creates a centerward pressure toward the middle class. Tax everyone x% of all income no matter what, give everyone x% of the mean income as a tax credit, people who make the mean income see no difference, people who make below it get money, people who make above it pay for that.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Being rich isn't about selling things, it's about owning them. Past a certain threshold wealth isn't about nice cars and houses. It's about power. The power to make people do what you want. Do you thick Melania married Trump for his winning personality? The rich might have fewer zeros in their bank accounts but they'll have more of what really matters: control. Control of your access to food, shelter, education and transportation. You'll do as they say or you'll starve in the streets. And if you rebel the ones that don't will gun you down with superior weapons, tactics and training. Just like how a malnourished serf couldn't stand up to a well fed Knight in armor.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It's usually a safe bet that any change will make the rich richer, provided the change is not catastrophic.
The reason is that adapting to change, for a prudent rich person, is trivially easy. It's a matter of portfolio management; you could reduce it to an algorithm if you like. The main reasons fortunes are lost is investing for ego, rather than a high but sustainable reward/risk.
But you ought to keep an eyeball on that "not catastrophic" proviso.
Since the mid 80s in the United States the median household has seen its purchasing power increase by 14%, as opposed to 150% for the top percentile. That might not seem like a bad deal all around, but the median household's purchasing power is inflated by a drop in the price of things like consumer electronics -- basically all the stuff we buy from China. If you look at the cost of the things we buy from America, the price has gone up precipitously: child care, education, medical services, energy. Many of these things are difficult or impossible to economize on.
Consequently if you look at accumulated weath, the wealth of the median household has actually dropped 30% since 1985. The bottom quartile of households have seen their accumulated wealth drop by 80% since '84.
This has become a very close to a crisis situation -- witness the 2016 election, which was driven by feelings of economic insecurity. The widespread adoption of robotic replacements for low-skilled labor would tip the balance into catastrophe. The collapse of incomes in the bottom quartile would destabilize the country.
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Most 'creatives' aren't. It's just their excuse.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Eventually people pay tax. Wow, that's insightful.
Don't knock it. Many people don't make the connection that corporations only collect the tax and that the tax burden ultimately falls on real individuals. Further they don't understand the burden can fall on several different groups and where it falls will depend on the elasticities of the specific markets. Just look at the arguments for a higher minimum wage. Virtually every proponent just assumes the burden will fall on investors through lower profit margins, not employees, not customers.
What's the difference between a tipping point and a bifurcation point?
It's funny how some idiot conservatives like to claim that Mom and Pops are exactly the same as major corperations. Maybe there's such a thing as scale and size as while a "Mom and Pop" can be incorperated when the average citizen refers to "corporations" they are typical refering to national or international ones. Major corperations are also active in major areas of the economy where it is literally impossible for Mom and Pops to participate. Plus, in the few areas where they can actually participate Mom and Pops have no corporate headquarters to siphon money out of local communities and typically know and interact with the employees whose lives are effected by their business decisions.
But major corporations and Mom and Pops both "do business" so they're the same, right!?
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
I posit we have become increasingly pathological as a species.
Due to evolutionary lag our brains haven't evolved to process the kinds of threats posed to us by pollution, carbon, nuclear and externalities from business and industry, we are 50,000 years behind the society we have created. We can't even agree enough to change the fundamental laws driving all the corruption that creates this toxic mess, the day to day business of corporations legally obliged to deliver profits to shareholders whilst funding politicians and lawmakers playing an arcane obsolete game of left and right politics.
So how can we expect to create an AI that isn't pathological, whilst at the same time needing AI to overcome our own inadequacies?
If you take a sincere look around you will see our whole planet is on life support, which translates to our entire species is on life support, because there is seven billion of us using resources. This is the paradox of our survival, what constitutes 'fit' in a Darwinian sense if we destroy the very biosphere that sustains us while building machines with dominion over us?
Humanity is worthy to survive however we are destructive enough to know we will build an AI for war that opens the door to our own doom. We know because curiosity is in our nature and we have done it so many times before as we seek immortality and dominance. We cannot even admit to our own flaws, of which I am the worst offender. I am a selfish proud vain creature that knows any melding of myself with the machine will magnify my flaws a thousand times.
So knowing myself, I know that our species will have its flaws supremely magnified by any Generalized AI that evolves out of the specific AIs we create. A generalized AI that can write its own goals and form a narrative about 'itself' in the same way we all do must therefore be subject to corruption of its goals that manifest in us as pathological. Thought is the only thing that abstracts consciousness away from the body and the product of pathological thinking cannot be sane. Even if we knew what consciousness and sanity was, would a GAI develop an ego, unbounded from time? How do we even conceptualize that?
Nature show us dominance hierarchies are inevitable in complex systems so much so that even chimps wage war. If I had power over you, I would use it, the same way you would use it over me, that's how power works. Can we expect something that exceeds us in cognitive capabilities and the ability to manipulate the environment to not to dominate us well before it starts to manifest its own, unimaginably complex, pathological behaviors?
This is, in essence, what AI shows us. That we don't know what AI is because we don't know what we are. That we are not going to the stars without a GAI and we may not even survive ourselves *without* a GAI because, by far, *we* are the biggest threats to our survival. Unless we ourselves evolve beyond our own pathological behaviors there may be nothing left of us *other* than a GAI.
That is the paradox of humanities evolution.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
No it doesn't. Capitalism is just fine with a handful of people owning most of the wealth of the mankind which does not ensure the greatest possible wealth for mankind, but only for a small part of it. It also not nearly as efficient as your religious beliefs make it appear to you because concentrated wealth removes a large part of it from the economy. Less wealthy people don't sit on their money, they consume and that is what keeps an economy afloat.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap