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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
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.
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.
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.
Yes? Presumably the increased profits were taxed.
Requiem for the American Dream
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.
Since using robots means they're lowering expenses and making more profits, replying "jacking up the prices" is even more greedy.
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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)
Also, along with your point. The robots replace humans. And had the humans been there, they would be taxed. So, as a worst case scenario, the prices when robots are there would only be jacked up as high as they were when humans filled the role - or not at all. And assuming that robots are taxed less than an equivalent human as is most likely the scenario, the prices would be jacked up less than when humans filled the role.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Companies cannot just "jack up prices". If they could make more profit at a higher price THEY WOULD ALREADY BE DOING THAT. If prices are already set to maximize profit, which is what any sane company does, then raising the price decreases demand, and diminishes profit.
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...
Your argument is valid, but only when circumstances don't change. When they do change, such as by introduction of a robot tax, the optimum price point will change as well.
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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Birth rates have stopped going down in Africa, despite improvements in education. More people will be born in Africa in the next 30 years than the rest of the world combined.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
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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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.
We should propose taxing Microsoft Office, for causing the sacking of millions of secretaries, just to see how he likes it.
Translation: I'm a sociopath
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
You're looking in the wrong place. Yes, there are fewer people on the factory floor. But there are MORE people in the supply chain. The people designing the robots, making the robots, fixing the robots, cleaning up after the people that designed the robots, cleaning up after the people that made the robots.....
That's how economies grow.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
In which advanced countries in Africa?
I take it you have never seen the accounting floor of a large business circa 1970 then, because it would have been filled with semi-skilled people filling out numbers in books and passing aggregated numbers to the next tier. Thats how books were done in those days. And those positions were replaced by spreadsheets, with automated cascading on changes, no need for more than a few people anymore.
See the following image for an accountancy department prior to computerisation (computerisation as we know it today):
https://benpadley.files.wordpr...
Its no different at all to your factory worker example. No different at all. You just never noticed the accounting jobs disappearing.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
One can be reasonably certain that by the end of this century, a great many jobs, white collar and blue collar, will be partially or fully automated. You can moan all you want about the madness of idle people, but really, if that is true, we are fucked.
But I don't think that's true at all. Just because people may not need to work to live doesn't mean they won't find other positive ways to occupy their time. Maybe Gene Roddenberry's vision of a future where people are free to pursue whatever they please may be a tad overly optimistic, but that's the way it is going. So we'd best start thinking about what society is going to look like in 20, 30, 50 and 100 years, and what kind of foundation we need to lay right now.
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.
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.
So, Africa doesn't have countries with universities and other hallmarks of an advanced country? India's classified as an advanced country - they can send probes to Mars - and yet they are a shithole with enough people without access to flush toilets (600 million and counting) to stand in line (2 feet total space for each person) from Mumbai to the Moon.
The United States is an advanced country, and yet look at the public health care system - but look fast, what there is won't be there long. Cuba and the US are pretty much tied for life expectancy - but Trump will Fake Amepika Great Again by "weeding out the weak, the old, the lame" while saving taxpayer dollars so his rich buddies can do whatever the filthy rich do.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I'll bite, there's a chicken and egg problem here. If you can only afford to feed and shelter yourself, where are the savings to buy a robot and ramp up a business going to come from? Everything is easier (although no business is easy) if you when have access to capital, either through inheritance or a job that pays above and beyond a living wage and allows you to save or service debt. To press the point further, nobody just "goes into business for themselves" anymore, it's not that simple. You need liability insurance, accountants, legal advice, marketing, and (again) access to working capital. Even if you have all that, 9 out of 10 businesses fail, landing you right back to square one, but with depleted savings and probably a newly formed unpaid debt.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
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.
"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
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!
You see where this is going right? Anyone with a "I got mine.. fuck the poor" attitude is setting themselves up to be at the receiving end of a bloody revolution. You can't just squeeze people to the point of desperation and tell them to go twist without consequences.
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.
To press the point further, nobody just "goes into business for themselves" anymore, it's not that simple
Talk about bullshit. Every economic downturn, the number of self-employed goes up. Why? Because it IS easy to go into business for yourself. And if the alternative is the gig economy, where you have none of the benefits and all the risks of being self-employed anyway, might as well cut out the boss and keep his cut for yourself.
Or did the gig economy, the rise of the precariat, fail to attract your attention? And the reality of education no longer being a guarantee of a job?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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...
And technology is getting to the point of this actually coming true! Once they perfect the battery's weight and amp hours it's all over..
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.
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.
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.
robots should be counted as three fifths of a human when it comes congressional representation, wages and taxation.
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.
Tax Corporate Revenues, Not Profits
Casteism