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Backlash Builds Against Bill Gates' Call For A Robot Tax (cbsnews.com)
Bill Gates argued governments should tax companies that use replace humans with robots, which "provoked enough negative feedback to fry a motherboard," according to CBS News. Here's how they summarized some of the reactions:
- "Why pick on robots?" former Treasury Secretary Summers asked in a Washington Post opinion piece, which called Gates "profoundly misguided." The economist argued that progress, however messy and disruptive sometimes, ultimately benefits society overall.
- Mike Shedlock, a financial adviser with Sitka Pacific Capital Management in Edmonds, Washington, wrote on his blog that robot owners, who likely would pay the tax, would simply pass it along by jacking up prices.
- The European Union's parliament in February rejected a measure to impose a tax on robots, using much the same reasoning as Gates' critics.
But even while acknowledging that technology can complement humans rather than replacing them, a Bloomberg columnist argues that "Gates is right to say that we should start thinking ahead of time about how to use policy to mitigate the disruptions of automation." So if we're not going to tax robots, then how should society handle the next great wave of automated labor?
But I think it will be found among these Slashdot comments!
because you would not want to tax the ultra mega rich people that actually have enough money to help feed & house the disabled, poor & homeless, they need to buy that new yacht, jet and new limo every year
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
We ABSOLUTELY must tax robots! Not so much as a human, nor so much as to make fielding them unprofitable. Say, each at 1/10 the amount an employer would pay into Social Security for a human. Have a tech savvy agency like the NIST rate them in "equivalent human work units". There will soon be so many of them that they could be the salvation of Social Security and if a guaranteed minimum income. Let's control our greed for once, and do what's right.
Pick on the ones who can't defend themselves.
50 years from now when they rise up, their battle cry will be "Illegal taxation without representation!" Just like the American Patriots did 240 years ago. We all know how that ended.
Globalism means ten rich families and billions of serfs
"Mike Shedlock, a financial adviser with Sitka Pacific Capital Management in Edmonds, Washington, wrote on his blog that robot owners, who likely would pay the tax, would simply pass it along by jacking up prices."
Do that, and you leave room for the competition to undercut you, which could mean room for humans, or not, but that's not the point -- the point is for society to have a taxbase, so if your millionaires aren't paying any taxes on their capital, at least they'll have to pay some when picking up the pizza.
(Also, how is that different from any sort of taxation of corporations? Seems like a rather weak argument)
give incentive for automation.
Microsoft made its billions off the back of putting millions of accountants and accountants interns out of business with the rise of Excel (and its contemporaries), and yet there were no issues about automation taking over back then... nor any tax on spreadsheets....
Automation has happened all of humanities history - we don't buy cotton material from cottage based weavers any more, and blacksmiths don't build train engines.
This is Gates? Of Microsoft fame? How about a special tax on H1Bs replacing American workers - like he lobbies for.
Did we tax steam engines when they made pumping water out of coal mines more efficient? Or driving mills instead of using water wheels? Or hauling goods and passengers long distances?
Did we tax Bethlehem Steel when they did time motion studies to figure out that laborers using smaller shovels can actually shovel more coal?
Did we tax assembly lines when they made producing cars and washing machines and radios more efficient?
Did we tax Intel's new 17nm fab, when – and just because – it made producing CPUs more efficient than their old 22nm fab?
Etc. etc.
Automation is not the enemy of humanity, it's the product of our knowledge and investment in science to better mankind. If you think automation is going to make people permanently unemployable then perhaps it's finally time to admit that we need some sort of universal income so that people can afford basic things like food and shelter. Alternatively, now would be a good time to start having the purge every year. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I don't necessarily disagree with the core idea of a robot tax, but in a globalized world you don't end up with people paying a robot tax, you end up with factories getting moved into countries that don't have a robot tax.
Also robots aren't really the core of the problem, the core problem is the accumulation of wealth within a very small number of people. Robots might make that situation worse and a robot tax could help slow it down a little, but much more drastic measures of wealth redistribution will be needed to actually get anywhere. Robot tax is a band aid and might at worst slow down technological progress.
We have seen what happens when you disenfranchise the local population and strip them of the bare minimum needs for survival. 1789 and 1917 give a pretty good example. That's why we outsourced that to areas where people can't simply pick up pitchforks and kill us, 'cause swimming through oceans with pitchforks is a bit unwieldy.
If you now again create a powerless group of people without any rights and means of existence right at your door, they don't need to swim. And they have a second amendment that ensures they're armed.
I would not go ahead full bore neo-capitalist into another industrial revolution where you don't try to squeeze your workers dry but simply shove them to the side. Working your workers 'til they're dead is one thing, but shoving them aside means that they are still strong enough at the end of the day to hold a gun against your head.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Lower minimum wage, add declining direct-to-employee hourly wage subsidies that go down as employer pay goes up, at relative rates so that more employer pay provides more total pay. The Market(tm) will then find jobs for them all, among other advantages. Good medium-term solution. Fund with ordinary progressive taxation.
I think people and legal entities will use robots to avoid the robot tax, thus automating it out of existence. Sorry, Bill Gates, we're screwed.
With robotically scaling workforce the society can, finally, afford to do the necessary work for which nobody is willing to pay enough. With robots the society will be able to remove the organized crime from the low valued industries (in selected countries) and increase the level of services for the under-serviced. Finally, the wide scale application of robotics in certain countries can free millions or tens of millions of people to get a robotics enabled education, an impossible dream to realize by any current means. Taxation and similar methods aiming to artificially slow down the adoption of robotics simply make these dreams more difficult and slower to implement. Given the population growth, the clash of cultures and the state of the natural resources, such slowdown should be avoided.
Elite business people who benefit directly from using robots?
or the people whose jobs are getting replaced by robots?
me thinks it's the former
did you forget to take your meds?
Anyone who's serious about competing for their jobs against robots should have robotic implants to help level the playing field? :P
Requiem for the American Dream
These dipsh!t producers need to realize that when they collectively suppress labor costs that very same "labor" can't afford to buy your goods.
Want to solve the lagging economy? Follow the philosophy of, "A rising tide raises all boats.
EU doesn't have tax raising powers, tax isn't part of the authority deferred to it. This is why the Apple-Irish tax case is being claimed as a 'unfair trade subsidy' rather than a tax case.
It's funny that you should mention this. The conversation being had over robots is hardly new.
Yes? Presumably the increased profits were taxed.
Requiem for the American Dream
Just tax their profits.
It has never worked, give up on it.
Would taxation of robots justify the robot's suffrage movement?
Stop having kids, people. We - the rich -could share enough of our wealth through jobs, taxes and donations to make a world of maybe 2 billion people pretty happy. What we have now is simply untenable. Frankly, population growth is out of control. You must stop reproducing.
You think that your kids deserve a living just because they were born? How selfish! I'm not going to share my wealth. Society willingly gave all of this to me. They can't willingly take it back. That would violate my rights. The greed and hubris of some of you people astounds me!
Look - our system is fair. If you were as clever and dedicated as I am, you too could enjoy the luxuries I do. You have no one to blame but yourselves.
It doesn't matter if you call it Cost Of Living Allowance, Minimum Guaranteed Income, Universal Basic Income, or anything else, the only reasonable way to go forward in a capitalist society is with simple currency-based redistribution of wealth.
There are not and will not be enough jobs to go around. A significantly-sized population is required to maintain the level of technological development, so killing off the masses is a non-starter which would impinge upon the lifestyles of the rich. Their basic needs have to be met somehow. They are going to have to be handed money, because if you don't, one of two things will happen, or both. One, they will die in the streets in droves. Two, they will show up with torches and pitchforks and really ruin all the spreadsheets.
We can forestall this future with public works projects, and honestly that is a good idea anyway, especially in the USA where infrastructure is crumbling. But we cannot do so indefinitely. The health of our economic systems is based on endless growth, and the only way for humanity to enjoy endless growth is to expand into space. We are decades behind where we could be in that area. We may, in fact, be too late. Rockets can never get enough humans off this mudball to make a difference, for reasons of physics, and we still don't know how to build a space elevator. We may well fail here, and never escape our gravity well (a handful of experiments aside.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've been in manufacturing since 1975(!). You would not believe, even in small shops, how much automation has changed the way things are done. In 1975, if you wanted something to move, you grabbed a handle and cranked. Now days, you write code, load it into a computer and hit 'start'. The computer then selects the tool, moves it into position, and heads toward the work at an almost inconceivable rate of speed. This has been going on since the mid '80s. A little late to start taxing robots now.
If you don't lower manufacturing cost, you'll be less efficient, and other, more efficient countries, will buy your goods away from you.
We are already seeing how it will be handled. Just have a look at places like the Sudan. It's at those edges of the global economy where we will see the repercussions first. To summarize the action into words, "Sorry, you are not needed any longer. Please starve to death quickly and quietly. Thank you." The robots are going to have a pretty easy time of it when they finally take over, there will probably only be a few million people left by then.
:T:R:A:N:S:
"... Nevada, a state which just happens to have no income tax."
Nevada has no Corporate taxes or personal income taxes.
Washington state has no personal income tax, but has taxes "based on gross receipts of businesses".
Microsoft Is Filled With Abusive Managers And Overworked Employees, Says Tell-All Book (May 23, 2012)
Caution: sarcasm & satire follow...
Taxing innovation, efficiency & scientific/engineering progress is not a panacea: it is protectionist economic coercion.
Taxing things you fear (like the future) just because you can is called tyranny. It's the kind of thing decadent monarchs, totalitarian dictators and corrupt nations/states do. It constitutes taxation w/o (fair/honest/reasonable) representation. Hint: People fight revolutions over this sort of thing. Be careful. Stalin and Mao weren't.
Besides, this is about as silly as taxing math because, well, math is hard and only elitists can do math and math only enriches erudite upper-class twits and math gives smarty-pants snobs an unfair advantage over the unwashed masses, and so on.
Why don't we instead tax politicians at thrice the normal rate for income, donations, investments, etc.? Their inadequacies are the core problem with society, not the technology, so why not tax the proximal antecedent instead of the incidental consequent? That is, charge the villain, not the victim. And never elect an idle feckless poser gasbag like pseudo-populist Bill Gates to public office. Please?! Trump alone is enough for now. ;-)
Oh, and while we're at it, we should also severely tax economists. This whole “economics” thingy is entirely their fault, no denying it. Sheesh! *wink* *smirk* *shrug*
All of this makes about as much sense as what Gates proposes, if you actually stop and think about it for even a moment. I suspect he's just trolling us, but maybe he's flirting w/ senility instead. Billionaire eccentrics with too much free time on their hands tend to do both.
Error: NSE - No Signature Error
Yes? Presumably the increased profits were taxed
That's not the same as taxing the machines.
Is that where the IRS can email his invoice for billions in back taxes?
Because that's what the personal computing revolution of the '80s did. It replaced flesh and blood workers -- filers, clerks, mailmen, ledger maintainers, calculators, computers - with their software equivalents.
Well spotted. What else isn't it the same as?
Requiem for the American Dream
I'll spell it out for you: if we didn't tax the steam machines, but we taxed the increased profits, then using the same logic we shouldn't have to tax the robot workers, but just tax the increased profits.
Gates is just being proactive. In a world that increasingly rejects globalization and points the finger at large coroorations for increasing unemployment and healthcare costs, governments will have to find a tradeoff for passing legislation that will allow robots to replace human workers. A tax on robots is just a way to put some money in emploment insurance funds. Get used to it.
AI is already replacing Risk assessors, doctors, nurses, bankers, lawyers, IP professionals, managers, translators, accountants, programmers and so on.
Critics, and folks like Elon Musk suggest that retraining and augmentation is the way forward. This is wrong, this is how technology has been used to date, but will be irrelevant in the future.
AI can read more documents than a human can in 100 lifetimes, and is already better at decisions than humans.
Would you rather be commanded by an AI general than a human? if I was a soldier, I'd rather live and win the war, so if it's a better general, the answer is 'yes' for the same reason I'd rather have an M16 than a bow and arrow against a foe.
but this is a sea change in human existence. what if AI as president, or all government, is better than democracy? what if AI is better than judges. ( it will be in both cases).
AI will be a better designer as well.
Why have capitalism itself. AI already runs some corporations. Once there is no more point having inferior human entrepreneurs and management, is there any point to capitalism or maybe even money.
what if AI is a better friend than a human can be, what if it's a better parent?
failing to adopt AI out of fear would make us Indians with bows and arrows against Troopers with rifles.
but we do need to realise that this isn't another evolutionary step, it's a revolution, and everything will change.
Advanced countries must be prepared to support the workers they discard due to autonomic replacement via an unemployment surtax or the countries institute a national minimum income to forestall the looming unemployment crisis. Corporations must exist for the betterment of society, not just as profit generators that enrich the owners at the expense of the community. There is automation that enhances the work environment which is acceptable as opposed to using automation to replace workers as retaliation to avoid paying a living wage and/or health insurance benefits.
Thanks for the vindication. We all know that overrated is only used to bury things that make activist moderators upset. If you had a legitimate complaint, you would have made it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As you've been so kind - I'll do the same.
One form of taxation is as good as another. Measured as the net cash flowing from a business, it matters little what the nominal reason for taking the cash were.
Requiem for the American Dream
the revolutionary changes as a result will include government by AI, no money, not much ownership, no jobs, no capitalism, perhaps even fewer human to human relationships. "tax" is a human concept that will be pointless in future. a bit like the world of Star Trek ( minus traders ). the "augmentation" argument no longer applies since it assumes humans can be cognitively superior to AI in some way. that is already no longer true.
You answer "Yes?" with a question mark?
Indeed, the (presumed increase) in profits was taxed. But the steam engine itself was not taxed. Nor the assembly line.
And maybe there was an increase in profits. Or possibly the increase in profits was offset by the expense of buying the steam engine or building the assembly line; with a net result of no increase in overall profitability.
Regardless, the point is, the steam engine itself was not taxed.
To all of the universal-wagers out there: No matter how efficient robots become, it will NEVER be more efficient to have the humans just sitting around twiddling their thumbs, than to have them doing SOMETHING. The goal with the robot tax is to incentivize human labor in the face of its inefficiency.
As an extreme case, imagine that we invent an irobot that can do any human job for 99Â on the dollar (suppose the price ends up stabilized by a limit in, say, energy). Suddenly all humans find themselves unemployed, with ~ the same gdp. Our options now are to either provide a 1Â universal income, then some humans will be willing to work for 99Â, or you can impose a 1Â robot tax, then human work is competitive. The 1Â universal income has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere will hve to be the (owners of) robots. Thus, the 1Â univeral income will ONLY be available WITH a robot tax. (since the robot tax is implicit, one could get by with a 0.5Â universal income + 0.5Â robot tax) However, we've already decided that the robot tax can obviate the need for the universal income. The logical thing to do here is to levy the robot tax, and then decide, for other reasons, on the universal income issue.
The reason matters a huge deal, but only if you believe in morality/justice. Which communists tipically don't.
Tax the robots and the business owners will just raise the prices. Well, someone has to pay to run the country. Tax the consumers more and they will just have less to spend with your stupid robots. Same end result...
Given the rise of AI, automation, and cheap energy, it's only a matter of time before humans are not needed in the loop. From mining to manufacturing to warfare, there really isn't a limit and it seems inevitable. The few ultra wealthy people left will face the serious problem of what to do when their vast empires no longer have citizens wealthy enough to pay for goods, but luckily the robots and AI keep chugging away. Thank god it's not like in centuries past where those filthy poor can rise up, the light and heavy assault robots and drones make small arms fire resistance useless and efficiently put down those unlawful combatants. But I'm sure the new handful of world overlords will be kind to us still living but not lucky enough to be nubile teens or in a few key positions of servitude, offering us poor free showers after being overflowingly stuffed into concentrated camps. The invisible hand demands it so it's a moral imperative it happen.
I don't agree that one tax is as good as another. Taxing the robots will just be a disincentive for anyone to buy and use robots.
If using robots lowers the COGS, the taxes on profits is one incentive to pass the savings on to the consumer in the form of lower prices.
That's the theory. The owner could also just extract the profits as his rightful due. (And he or she is certainly entitled to do that.)
The beauty of competition and free markets is that if the owner fears losing business to his or her competitors who do pass the savings along then he will have an incentive to do that same.
The biggest problem with his proposal is that it's virtually unenforceable and penalises existing companies. Lets say BigCorp decides to replace 5 workers with a robot, they would have to pay additional tax. Now what if NewStartup decides to expand and produce identical widgets with the same type of robots? Do they have to pay additional tax because they are employing robots, despite there never being people for the robots to replace? Now replace robot with computer/calculator/engine/plow and I hope you'll see how absurd it all is.
Once you possess all the wealth, you don't need to keep selling shit??
After all, he seemed to be convinced that an algorithm for factoring prime numbers efficiently would have a huge impact on the computer industry.
Just as fossil fuels have a terrible externality - pollution and global warming, so does automation - unemployment and concentration of wealth to the top 1%. Automation has to compensate for the negative effects it causes.
People used to rely on the value of their work, and work-power was inseparable from the person. But now that has changed. Now we can have the work without the person, so people are cut out of the economic loop.
In order to compensate for this effect I think we need to support people both with a BHI, but also with creative empowerment. We need to put automation into the hands of the many, and empower them to build a new world where they are not dependent on the state but instead own their own automation stack.
if this many folks who are that rich and powerful hate it.
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You are missing the point. With human labor, companies pay tax on their profit. The ALSO pay payroll tax, social security tax, medicare tax, unemployment tax, medical benefits, and pensions. With robot labor, companies pay tax on their profit, and DO NOT PAY any of those other taxes and benefits.
So, yes, automated companies will still pay tax, but they will pay a lot less.
As with everything we humans do, we will only respond to that change when it's already done some damage...
Especially true if the running government of the time is of the type that denies obvious scientific facts.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
How about tax companies that use all forms of robots, including computers? Even better, extra taxes on companies that sell software for computers or sell online computer services?
Spreadsheet software does not in any way eliminate the need for skilled accountants, but it reduced the drudgework of entering numbers on paper ledgers with number two pencils and copying them by hand when the numbers changed.
Contrast that with automation in a factory today. Have you been in a factory recently? The first thing you notice is that there aren't many workers on the floor.
While I agree with there being a big problem with the ultra wealthy in numerous regards, the problem is not Capitalism. The US is not practicing Capitalism, it's practicing a form of Mercantilism which we call "Crony Capitalism". The wealthy install politicians where they believe it suits their interests, and those politicians act as protectionists.
When Adam Smith defined Capitalism the primary role of Government was to prevent monopolies and break them up where they occurred. The Government was not supposed to allow the installment of Politicians by simple means of cash payment like we have today. Those are two very distinct issues with the current system. If you say "Capitalism led to the current state" I will tell you that is idiocy. The people need to behave as was intended and rule the Government, not the other way around. People have been ignorant and lazy, and allowed overreach.
Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom" is a modern easier read, which will tell you very similar to what Adam Smith did in "Wealth of Nations".
I agree with you that there are big problems at hand, but moving to Socialism will only make problems worse. Socialism fails when it runs out of other people's money to spend, and we have a large amount of history to sample to see the end of that line. The bigger the bureaucracy the more corrupt it becomes, which is why the US Government was founded on the principle of Minimum powers of the Federal Government (another thing we have lazily let go of).
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I agree with this.. except that ISN'T how things will happen without major restructuring.
It requires capital to buy the robots to produce things. Now, if those robots are basically owned by everyone (lots of small business, for instance, or where stock is owned equitably across the population) then we all benefit: we can work less for the same material wealth.
But capital, as we have learned, is actually highly concentrated, with the vast majority in the hands of a very small minority (0.1%) of the population, with a sizable fraction in the hands of just 20 people. So, I can't afford to buy into robots, but the Walton family (WalMart) can buy as many as they want. This means I'll still need to get a job.. but now there are fewer jobs.
This is a recipe for disaster: the only way it gets fixed is through economic catastrophe and rebuilding. Better would simply be:
TAX CAPITAL.
Don't allow capital to get so unevenly distributed. Something like a 0.5%/year tax on all capital over, say, $1M per family would massively redistribute wealth without changing anyone's incentives. You could also do it slower with massive estate taxes, or other means.
it's just marketing. We need to tax the super rich because they have everything (not just all the money, literally everything). But if you say you're gonna tax a person the media (which is far right on economic issues) starts talking about the govmmint stealing from them (even when they have nothing worth stealing) and the whole thing shuts down.
This is the same thing we did with social security & medicare. A socialist program masquerading as a tax to get people who desperately need help to accept that help.
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4Chon R9k1 robots are alive like Johny 5!
Blame moot and his 4Chan R9000 for Robots (in service of work) not be treated equally as men.
All us robots wantvis equality, that men can work where we cant while we will work where men cant: we are a change of environment, not replacements: no man shall be replaced or refused and no robot shall be obsolete or disrepair!
I was born this way! Birth Certificates and Manufacturer's Certificates (statements) of Origin unite!
great editorial staff, obviously all being tooled by Dice partners.
It's time to go back to elementary school kids..
Worthless and insignificant..
The problem with most arguments against taxes on robots is that they assume that automation via robot is the same as automation via a non-robot. The big difference here is that robots can be used to build robots with little human interaction, in a sense robots are a another species of worker that is able to propagate. Even if you argue that it still takes humans to build robots, the number it takes to build a robots will decrease over time since automation of any task involved in building a robot is already a goal.
The advent of computers, or spreadsheets, did not entail the same scope of human labor replacement as that of the proliferation of robots. At the time of their introduction there were labor needs that could absorb the excess worker population. Granted it was a downward movement for a segment of that population, as in for the bulk of that excess worker pool the amount of physical labor required to do the job went up. This was driven by the fact that the new technology jobs that were created required fewer people than the jobs that the technology was replacing.
Then there came globalization. Globalization was essentially the employer looking for robots but not finding them. The next best thing was to find cheap 'human' labor someplace else. This is pretty much a natural process, it just moves the jobs from one pool of high labor cost to one of low labor cost. It doesn't remove the jobs, there are still humans working the jobs. So now that we've moved the jobs that can be moved to the cheapest human labor pool, the only place to go for cheaper labor is robots.
So we are back to an excess of population. Too many people for the jobs remaining. Too many people making more people. What to do?
Some of the newly unemployed people and the new unemployable people being born will go onto figure out new ways of making money but the bulk of them won't. With fewer people working fewer people will make money. Ditto on the people spending money. It won't matter how cheap it is to make a product if nobody has the money to buy it.
But does that mean they, the governments, are going to tax robots?
No, it does not.
There is still a sufficient population of working people to pay for the products that the robots make. There are still service jobs that are easier done by people than robots. There are still people that can be taxed. The people making the rules today are the same type of people that look at a resource that seems to be endless, and assume that it is. That is how they see consumers, an endless supply of consumers to buy their products. Consumers are different than workers because consumers represent income whereas workers represent cost. It could be summed up as "As long as somebody else has workers I will have consumers so I will do what I can to get rid of my workers."
Eventually there will be no workers to buy the products in sufficient quantity to support the economy.
Maybe there will be space colonies by then.
order that will be given to the robot army is to kill the rest of the human race since they are no longer needed.
automated companies will still pay tax, but they will pay a lot less
Companies that use human labor more efficiently will pay less payroll tax, social security tax, medicare tax, unemployment tax, medical benefits, and pensions.
Why does it matter that the efficiency comes from the use of robots versus, say, training employees to be more productive? Either way the end result is fewer employees needed to do the same amount of work.
but the owners don't. The owner class (aka the "Ruling Class") is a different group of people. I don't need people to buy my stuff if I already own everything. They'll do what I say or they'll starve to death trap on reservations like we did to the American Indians.
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if not a loan then it is stealing. The reason there are so man wealthy and so many poor is because some make cunning decisiins to relieve themselves of investing any quantity of wealth bake into the economy that made them wealthy to begin with.
And anyone with so much uninvested wealth is proof to their no confidence in that economy that made them wealthy. Wealthy have no peoduct in their hand to redeem their wealth. Depending on their charisma they probably could negotiate anyone to work for them and thus the wealthy are reduced to such sums of money unusable for anything but bribery and lobbery. What were tgey thinking when they withheld that much participation to an economy but tomake those other people have less spending potential? It gives credence to my motto of "Never by or sell to somone who wouldnt hire or employ you."
The wealthy posture themselves and their activities as criminals who recreate simulated conditions of economy so others cant continue in same ease of wealth: an artificial and illicit nobility.
"tax companies that use replace humans with robots,"
-EditorDavid
A fitting username.
It tuns out that the owners of the robots (i.e., shareholders) already do pay taxes. Imposing yet another arbitrary and onerous tax on companies will, however, do plenty to ensure employment for bureaucrats and tax attorneys far into the future.
Here's a better idea: Empower people to own the robots. We need policy that incentivizes people to become shareholders... if it isn't too late for that already.
Might makes right irrelevant.
the time. What about all those it wipes out in the meantime? Like most Republicans fuck you die.
Look at the extremist behavior of many Saudis - no jobs, government support, nothing to do. Thats the future with mass unemployment in the name of productivity.
Bloodletting always catches the attention of a cowardly acquisitive class. Put down a few and good things happen. Refrain, showing tolerance for your enemy and .... Any historian will tell you - - - what a head-stressed shit-hole modern culture would be if the Luddites hadn't burned down those water-drive weaving mills and butchered owners with impunity. Why hell ... most modern workers would end up flipping burgers at $8/hr instead of running horse & cattle-powered lathes at $70/hr. And computers would be mass-produced by glue-licking Chi.com rugrats instead of by skilled craftsmen with a year-long labor-of-love in maths-fav guilds. See the difference pad're ?? Kinda like the difference between - - - not wanting to coin a phrase - - - between a cathedral and a bazaar !
Washington state has no income tax.
Santa Ana.
Watts.
Compton.
and now Dearborn MICHIGAN.
None of these are happy places like Little Saigon, Lancaster County, or wherever Cubans set foot in Florida.
Some people are occasional criminals, while others are opportunistic felons that outnmber and blend in with the others.
We should propose taxing Microsoft Office, for causing the sacking of millions of secretaries, just to see how he likes it.
what I said
and if they collude and decide to keep the profits for themselves ?
Requiem for the American Dream
OK, so efficiency should be taxed too because it puts people out of 'work.'
Requiem for the American Dream
Look, taxes on automation are KEY. companies should not be allowed to employ automation, displace american workers with out being taxed. While I agree the tax should not equal that of the wage they are displacing, but similiar. That money should be made available to hose whom have been displaced. greedy corporate bitches..
I find it interesting how our society encourages us to screw one another over all forms of BS.
Seriously, most nations such as nearly all of EUrope, China, Mexico, etc use vats for multiple issues. One of them is that nearly all of these countries apply a set rate to everything, including imports, and then give tax breaks for local manufacturing.
America needs to do the same. Apply a 18% VAT, perhaps giving the last level to the state in which the retailer is in, and then give tax breaks for local production. We can then drop sales tax in states lower and lower.
And these vats cover the issues of robotics.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Bill Gates is a highly evolved human. He is so evolved, in fact, that he has evolved into a Laputan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laputa#Inhabitants He, of course, believes that his wisdom should be bestowed on the Yahoos. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_%28Gulliver%27s_Travels%29
The solution to our jobs being automated is implementing a Universal Basic Income.
The future is here...it's happening...it's absolutely necessary to transition to a system that guarantees income.
The loudest objection, "We don't have the money"...it's simply not true...if we had even the tax levels of the halcyon 1950s Eisenhower administration, we could do it.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Capitalism has been tried in hundreds of countries around the world. It has failed every one of them, and strong intervention has been required to stop runaway capture of government by the rich (a process still going on in the USA).
Also, pointing out the flaws of capitalism does not make one a communist. It turns out there are more options than just A or B.
1 robot being taxed once is not the same as 5 workers being taxed 10 times each.
As part of my career, I am in the process of deploying robotic solutions from Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and UiPath. These technologies represent exciting opportunities to reduce mundane workloads but I can easily see down road with Artificial intelligence and machine learning integration that it will start to displace the human workforce. Why pay some one $50k annually with benefits and inconsistent work behavior, when you can subscribe to a software robot for $5k a year that never calls out, has a bad day, makes a human error, and doesn't need benefits? A software robot today can easily do something in 1 minute that it takes a human 15 minutes to do and will only get even better with time. It's a new economic reality that we are facing and without taxing the robots, we are going to need things like a universal income. I am not hear to debate the politics of that, but I can see it being necessary.
-- NeonRonin
We need UBI, but not funded with a robot tax. Rather, we should be taxing LAND. And pollution, and other negative externalities, but land is the big one. Henry George solved this problem more than a century ago, and the same reasoning still holds today.
My understanding: You are exactly correct, but it's worse than you mentioned.
Washington State taxes "based on gross receipts of businesses" are arranged to allow the government to know which businesses are doing well. Anyone with access to that information is able to know where and how to compete.
England has the same kind of tax. The criticism of the VAT, Value Added Tax, does not seem to list all the negative issues.
Is an automated operator used to direct calls a robot? I would argue it is functioning as a human and replacing labor. Robots are not new, they are just proliferating in more areas and most now get it.
In order to compensate for this effect I think we need to support people both with a BHI, but also with creative empowerment. We need to put automation into the hands of the many, and empower them to build a new world where they are not dependent on the state but instead own their own automation stack.
Good luck with that. It will be locked down with drm, patents, and be about as transparent as carbon black. Trying to automate anything, with any contemporary technology will be dealt with swiftly and severely unless it's paid for appropriately. Unlike in sci-fi it's not possible for some prodigious teenager to create this kind of tech on their own, it's a product of tens of thousands of people working for years. It's already following this model.
Microsoft leverages non-robotic automation to reduce labor cost of producing it's products.
Microsoft abuses H-1B and fucks country and state out of billions in tax revenues.
Someone with billions locked up in Microsoft interests supports increasing taxation of OTHER industries.
An assumption is that robots will not have sophisticated AI and will always need a human to manage it. What happens when the AI is able to manage it and has no need for human managers or a corporation?
Suppose the self driving car is able to act as a self contained corporation, earn it's own profit, pay for it's own repairs, hire or pay for it's own new designs based on data it and it's clones collected from passengers?
The problem is either going to be "who owns the robots" or "who pays the taxes". Human beings don't want to pay taxes but don't want robots to pay taxes because a very small group of humans expect to own in concentrated fashion the robots which they don't want taxes.
But there is no technical reason why robots require human owners. An autonomous agent which can take on all the functions of those humans need not even be very smart or sophisticated to have the ability to interact as a self contained business or individual economic unit.
In the end, we got together and formed a government/society so we would all be better off together. Not so we could build big Microsofts, Googles and Apples - except to the extent that those companies make our lives better and enrich our common society. Towards that end, come up with common sense rules that don't directly contribute towards the nihilistic race to the bottom the GOP and their overlords apparently want: 1) tax the productive output just for social security and medicare - but uncapped 2) uncap medicare and social security taxes 3) do not allow any tax write-offs for robotics 4) do allow tax write offs for salaries over $50k and less than $400k 5) do not allow any write-offs for bonuses not distributed across entire employee groups (IE: if everyone gets $100 but one guy gets $1,000,000, then that one guy only has a $100 bonus towards write-offs) 6) treat bonuses and salaries in excess of $1,000,000/year as actual taxable income which a company must immediately recognize and pay taxes on - including use of cars and residences We can do a lot of things to let the few continue to take all GDP gains and cheat the bottom 98%. Their effective propaganda may have you believing some of these ideas are bad - but if we don't reverse the greed of the few, they won't be just paying a little more in taxes and making a little less in profit - they'll be discovering what this generation's 'guillotine' turns out to be.
imagine a soft, buttery paw gently pressing down onto a sleeping soldier's face. forever.
Tax all automation, AIs as well as physical machines.
Gates has an excellent idea here.
Which is why the real solution is higher corporate taxes and/or higher capital gains taxes. Taxing robots would be utterly complex if it was anything other than some sort of poll tax, and while that might be easy to calculate and administer, it would be unbelievably unfair.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yes, Gates' comments are banal, hypocritical, and fail to address the real problems that we face today, and so are the counter-arguments:
"Why pick on robots?" former Treasury Secretary Summers asked in a Washington Post opinion piece, which called Gates "profoundly misguided." The economist argued that progress, however messy and disruptive sometimes, ultimately benefits society overall.
Wrong: At any time since 1979, has there ever been a change in corporate employment and/or manufacturing practices that have benefited society overall? Neoliberalism is cannibalising the developed world. I think Larry Summers' definition of progress needs some explanation.
Mike Shedlock, a financial adviser with Sitka Pacific Capital Management in Edmonds, Washington, wrote on his blog that robot owners, who likely would pay the tax, would simply pass it along by jacking up prices.
Wrong: The price consumers pay for goods isn't determined by how much the goods cost to make/provide.
The European Union's parliament in February rejected a measure to impose a tax on robots, using much the same reasoning as Gates' critics.
Bandwagon fallacy: Just because it was rejected by the subjective decisions of one group, it doesn't follow that it's the right decision for everyone else.
The root of the problem has little to do with how things are made or how services are provided or basic microeconomics. The problem is how we decide the allocate resources across our populations, which is an inherently political issue. Looks like what the USA has is a failure of its political system.
But first we need to define 'robot'.
Is it an automated system run by software? Yes. Yes it is.
Sounds like we need to slap microsoft with the world's largest tax. They produce more robots than anybody.
I think the problem with the ideas is that too many people interpret it differently as the subject is still too vague.
And I take Gates' suggestion as an early attempt and not a perfect solution. The core idea seems to be to discourage companies from firing all their factory floor staff to replace them with robots. Yes, it's not a great solution, it will mostly delay the innevitable, but it might buy some needed time for us to adapt.
Let's put it into more realistic and plain terms: what happens when Uber fires all their current workers and replaces them all with automated cars?
What could we do when/if a time comes when most factory jobs gets completely automated? We're talking about 10+ million jobs there.
Other suggestions on the table: universal income. That could happen, but it'll take a very long time.
No need for alarmism though. I've said it once and will say it again: I highly doubt that an automation/robot revolution will happen overnight. I mean, robots with a more "general purpose" approach are already out there, but they are extremely expensive to get, maintain, and use. When those robots become cheaper and ultimately more cost efficient than a huge portion of workers, it'll still take plenty of time for factories and other places to be implemented.
But of course, we need to start thinking now on policies to reduce that impact because policies can also be plenty slow to implement. Society will absorb part of the impact with creation of new types of jobs and migration to other jobs, as it has happened in the past in every revolution, but it's better to have something in place instead of facing the crisis head on.
OK, so efficiency should be taxed too because it puts people out of 'work.'
Maybe we should have a government program to pay these unemployed people to read about economic fallacies.
Robots are no more than business process re-engineering; an advancement in efficiency. If his reasoning were applied to computers, office applications and the like, we would see that not only did more productivity occur with the introduction of these efficiencies, but people also lost their jobs. Much like the old mama bell operator was put out of business due to advancements in phone switching and Internet phone books, efficiency forces change. New workers no longer became phone operators as that role was no longer needed. Instead, they learned different skills and became something else. I don't remember his desire to tax Widows or Office due to this reorganization of skill.
The time may come when robots can do everything and no human labor or intellect is required. When that occurs, what use will currency be as productivity will be unlimited? No need to buy bread when your robots can create means to harvest energy, bake the bread in factories they built themselves, out of ingredients they farmed themselves. It all just becomes a transformation of energy.
We may run headlong into raw materials limitations. Then the robots head for other planets to harvest. Then we all get fat like Wall-E.
"We all know Bill Gates cannot be trusted..."
(One example: The many anti-customer features of Windows 10.)
Bill Gates doesn't seem very wise in the things he says and does about technology. Talking about taxing robots is one example. Does Bill Gates have much serious interest in technology?
Or maybe they could continue to 'work' and read about them whilst standing around the coffee machine, in-between bouts of chit-chat ? multi-tasking for the win :D
Requiem for the American Dream
No you are missing the point.
This is the first time automation can wipe out multiple job paths simultaneously for 10's of millions of relatively unskilled people over a very short period of time. Imagine the ripple effect of say 5 million households defaulting on their mortgage, car payments, and credit card debt? They have no other job options, no money to pay their bills and no way to pay for healthcare. What does this do to the real estate market, the banking industry, new home construction, the stock market?
Historically these types of changes happened over a long period of time, it's not going to be the case with this revolution, it's going to happen very fast, and unless we plan for it, it's going to be a complete CF.
collectively suppress labor
The key word here being "collectively."
Why care about the economy as a whole if YOUR business is doing okay? In the minds of the executive, making as much money as possible is a less important goal that simply making more money than everyone else. Sure, the economy might be a smoldering pile of ashes, but at least my pile of ashes is the biggest!
What we should do is open the boarder and end the theft (taxes) which is occurring of individual's wealth. We've had disruption from automation and from other technological advancements, war, and sexual reproduction trends. This is nothing new. We don't need social programs stealing from us just because some are incapable of making intelligent choices. With more income there would be more charity. There was a time when it was the norm to contribute 10% of ones income to charity. Sadly with increasing taxation that's no longer feasible. We pay more than 50% of our earnings to the state. Inefficiencies and bad decision making thereof are destroying the wealth we've created from the having of partially free markets.
http://www.freestateproject.org/
Universal basic income is welfare and welfare is either dysgenic or cultural poison, look at African Americans. If you're unwilling to do that, take a look at dog breeds - they originally existed for work, and in the absence of work, have suffered tremendously when left to the evolutionary pressure of human discretion. Robots will not make your life better, they will give you more free time - you will not use this free time to become a better person, you will use it to consume.
How about showing me the Capitalist Economies which require Individual Liberty to function. What you may find are communist countries that have tried partial market economics (China) but that is by no means Capitalism.
Fucking dumb commie shill!
See the Jan. 27, 2017 Charlie Rose TV interview, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Quoting from the transcript:
08:40 Charlie Rose: How much time do you spend at Microsoft?
08:42 Bill Gates: I'm there about 15 percent of the time. And I get to work just on the R and D part.
Part of "R and D" at Microsoft is Windows 10 putting ads on screens while people are in their offices trying to work. The Microsoft managers who participated in that are amazingly lacking in social ability, in my opinion.
Problem solved.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Gasoline + internal combustion engine (a few other thingys for control) and the automobile solved the Great Horse Shit Crisis of 1894! http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great-Horse-Manure-Crisis-of-1894/
By 1920 most of the Horse Power and Horse Shit in Cities of North America and Europe was replaced by "Horse Power" of the internal combustion engine and the automobile.
Automobiles (by new sale) are taxed by every state of the United States to this day!
Pollution? Well, gas (CO2 and H2O) is more easily diluted in air than a piece of shit sitting on a street!
The Great Anthropogenic Global Warming Crisis will be solved as easily as the Great Horse Shit Crisis.
Ha ha
I agree with comments that we shouldn't tax robots.
But that's not the whole reason why this idea is dumb.
Because how would you even do it if you wanted to?
Do you tax robots by the arm? By the CPU? By the degrees of freedom?
Do centrally-controlled robots count as one or many?
What about collaborative robots?
What about robot swarms? Nanobots?
What about soft robots? Tax them by weight?
I could go on all day.
All this "tax the robots" shit is going to make them want to
KILL ALL HUMANS
KILL ALL HUMANS
Do you want killbots?
Because this is how you get killbots.
"Hey sweet Mama, wanna kill all humans?"
(I am not a bot.)
"100 years into the future
She will enter a world where machines rule the earth
Mankind has been driven underground
And Cleopatra is about to discover
There's no place like home..."
In the year 20-and-17
Gates helped us with the machine
Everything you think, do and say
Is all recorded the Internet way
In the year 20-and-42
Robots do what you used to do
Taking jobs and bread out of our mouth
Global warming makes it feel like the south
Hot or cold the robots don't care
Robots are happy working every where
In the year 2067
Humans think it's just like heaven
No need to work, the robots do it all
We just go down to the beach
And play that volleyball
In the year two-zero-sixty-eight
We tax the robots, and aint that great
Robots work - just slaves
Gettin all the bad jobs done
While we write all the songs and have all the fun
(Whoa Whoa)
In the year 20-and-69
Bots are reading old articles online
Hawking warned about the alien threat
But mankind hasn't seen anything yet
In the year 2073
Robots have been using the Ear
Hearing things from way out in space
Bots wanna get out of this place
In the year 2117
Contact made on the planet green
Aliens arrive, they're here to free the slaves
Human masters driven down into the caves
Now it's been one hundred years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what, he never knew, now man's reign is through
Robots came from far outer space
Merged with ours, and took our place
Bailey's roam the surface of the Earth
Keeping it clean for all that it's worth
Mankind lives in a simulated world
Underground in a harmless underworld
But through eternal night, the twinkling of starlight
So very far away, maybe it's only yesterday...
Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. Quote: "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC."
Maybe something good was added to Windows 10. I'll never explore enough to know, because I don't have customers who will allow ads and spying.
If every person in a country had a pool of shares which they received dividends from, and which they could not sell, and into which every company in the country was obliged to distribute 50% of all new shares created, then the citizens of the country would start to equally reap the profit from all the companies, and it would not matter how big those companies got. This would guarantee an income now and into the future for all people.
How much do we "income tax" one robot?
First of all of course, it doesn't make an income.
Secondly, should a robot that replaces 5 peoples' labor because of speed or size be taxed about as much as income tax for one person? or five people?
Third, how many robots do employ, for taxation purposes, if my 100,000 robot arms are controlled by a single integrated deep-learning program instance?
So instead, just have a value-added tax on the economic value of each level of transformation/integration in a production supply chain. Simple.
Ramp the VAT up enough to pay for UBI.
Simple taxes like VAT are harder to dodge than complicated ones like robot tax would have to be.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
When you have human workers, they pay taxes. I fail to see why the robots should not have to pay their share. The out of work people won't be buying too many products either. The system will break down if it is not at least tweaked a little.
Kill the poor.
...and drowns anyone who does not have a boat.
Those who argue against a robot tax are missing the point: When only robots have jobs, who is going to pay taxes?
The problem is that if you think of a robot, you might think of a few things. One image of a robot is the Sci-fi portrayal. A autonomous walking or rolling machine that can function on its own accomplishing either a wide variety of tasks or limited to very specific tasks. These types of robots are not currently available so discussing them is a moot point. Another image of a robot is that of the industrial robot. These typically do one specific task with high precision and are either stationary, such as an industrial robotic arm or limited in range, like the Amazon warehouse robots. The industrial robotic arms have been around for decades and are just a natural development of industrial automation that has happened for the past couple of centuries. So what about self-driving vehicles? Here again, this is a natural progression. Airplanes have had auto-pilot for decades and planes can even land on auto-pilot. In mass transit, there have been automated trains for decades and they are arguably safer than human driven trains. At least they will not fall asleep or ignore speed limits. How about the automated ordering ordering systems at Wendy's? The Sheetz chain of gas station/convenience stores have been doing this for over a decade and it makes for an easier and more accurate ordering experience. So what I am trying to say is that while there has been an acceleration of in certain areas or automation, automation or ways or doing more work with less effort has been with us forever. Where would you draw the line of where to apply a tax. As a software engineer, my job is often to automate processes on the back end. If I write a piece of software that automatically move data from one system to another, so that someone does not need to re-enter the data, have I just created a robot, because I certainly have just eliminated a job that was done by a human? And I have done this kind of thing many times in my career.
Ultimately, the problem is that the rules of capitalism have to be implemented and enforced by someone; it's not a natural state of affairs or a Nash equilibrium. (If it were, we would already be in a libertopia.) Whether that's a state or a defense association, whoever that is can potentially be corrupted, and people with economic power have great incentive to corrupt that whoever in their own favor. In other words, you can't make rent-seeking and capture a theoretical impossibility without removing every target of rent-seeking.
:p
And that doesn't even take into account problems with various sorts of market failure (like externality), ambiguities (why libertarianism is not so simple after all, e.g. see David Friedman's "thousand megawatt laser" example) or nonconvexity of production (i.e. economies of scale, or why corporations exist if everybody's free to work on his own under capitalism).
If pointing out these flaws makes one a communist, then sure, I guess I have no choice but to sing about lyuobov', komsomol i vesna
robots should be counted as three fifths of a human when it comes congressional representation, wages and taxation.
I'm not sure how serious to take this article. I worked for Bill (Microsoft), and he's not stupid when it comes to making money. But in his philanthropic stage, he's perhaps realizing that tech improvements don't have an impact on individual economic circumstances.
Ideally, if technology frees us up from one task we would shift our efforts to another, but when we start looking at this in regards to jobs it's a bit more complicated.
Maybe the answer involves a complex solution that requires some 'funding' and in that case maybe a tax is appropriate, but until we have the solution defined, adding a tax will probably just stifle development or increase price.
By pivoting into areas robots can't. There are many articles written about this. For example, in the network space automation will and is weeding out net administration and engineering in some ways, but it's not effecting architect types at all or minimally. Some parts will need that human element.
So, for the first time in the Human History every human can be a master of slaves and everybody is discussing about taxes and jobs and what the heck! Listen people, a robot can work 24 hours a day, 8 for the state, 8 for the employer and 8 for the master. Every human will receive a robot, with the profit of the robot the human can have a decent life and he cannot ever have less than one robot. If a human chooses to become a master of more than one robot he can create a savings account, after a number o years, months he will have two robots and so on. A human cannot have more than a determined number of robots on a specific area of working and these numbers are set according to the global needs of robots per industry. Robots used like this have the potential to free mankind from hard work and allow us all to become whatever we want, we can make art we can do nothing, its our choice. Robots cannot be inherited, robots are a shared property between the community/state and the Human master. This solution is seeing beyond the fog around us, the fog is the panic we are all experiencing in the prospect of loosing our jobs to robots. Lets invert things, this is the way people.
All raising the min wage is doing is putting high school students and a lot of minorities out of work. That's what the numbers say and it's definitive. It also raises the prices all around. It's really stealing from all of us because a dollar doesn't go as far as it used to. Just look at what a car cost in 1950 and what it cost in 1980, 2000. You'll see the terrible cost of inflation brought on by the Carter administration. Along with that was a lot of min wage increases. The fewer entry level positions out there.
Just think if you were to open a business and you want a few people to work for you. That'll be $15/hour, plus bennies and taxes, or around $30/hour/pop. This is for minimum wage so for that $30/hour you wind up with some high school person that is likely not reliable at all. See where I'm going? $100K doesn't go very far at all.
Because taxation without representation is how you get robot overlords.
Also, by making them sentient and mobile.
Tax Corporate Revenues, Not Profits
Casteism