San Francisco Politician Jane Kim Is Exploring a Tax On Robots (businessinsider.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: In San Francisco, where robots already run food deliveries for Yelp's Eat24 and make lattes at a mall coffee kiosk, one politician is working to ensure the city stays ahead of the curve. Supervisor Jane Kim is exploring a tax on robots as one solution to offset the economic devastation a robot-powered workforce might bring. Companies that use robots to perform tasks previously done by humans would pay the city. Those public funds might be used to help retrain workers who lose their jobs to robots or to finance a basic income initiative. Kim, one of 11 city supervisors in San Francisco, has been interviewing tech leaders, labor groups, and public policy experts in the hopes of creating a task force that will explore how a "robot tax" might be implemented. San Francisco would become the first city to create such a tax, after European lawmakers rejected a similar proposal in February. Kim learned the concept of a robot tax when Bill Gates called for one in an interview with Quartz. It struck a chord with the San Francisco politician, who represents some of the poorest and wealthiest residents across the Tenderloin, South of Market, Civic Center, Treasure Island, and several other neighborhoods. She hears of robots cropping up in hotels, hospitals, and even her local bar, and worries about how automation might deepen the income gap.

Comments

San Franciso

[Anonymous Coward]

Highest tax rate in the Western Hemisphere and constantly bankrupt.

Re:San Franciso

[cayenne8]

Has there EVER been a politician born that attained office that didn't thing of EVERYTHING they saw as a taxable opportunity???

Is there none of them, that come from the regular people pool that know we pay too much already, and could better keep and spend our own money rather than find some new, creative way to give to the a bloated bureaucracy and hope they can spend it better than we that earned it can?!?!?!

Re:San Franciso

[ArmoredDragon]

Apparently, you consider sitting around and letting robots do work for you to be "earning".

Well, how are we going to define a robot? If it's a machine that can accomplish physical tasks automatically without human input, then it's quite broad; calculators would be included, for example.

At work I was asked to configure a bunch of switches (about 70) with the same command set with small variation, and it was expected to take about a day to do, which would mean I'd have to manually open an SSH session numerous times. Instead I just wrote a script in 10 minutes that completed the job in 5 minutes.

Does that mean I'd have to pay a tax? If so, that's absurd, and I'd fight that tooth and nail.

We can't just tax shit just because somebody came up with a way to automate it, otherwise the tech industry itself would have to be taxed to basically nonexistence. The word "computer" used to refer to a person, whereas nowadays it refers to an object. The economy simply cannot scale without automation, and it will severely hamper growth if we have to tax every little thing that gets automated.

By the way, I'm calling BS on anybody who thinks automation will make human labor obsolete or will otherwise result in long-term job losses. Yes, frictional unemployment is a real thing, but every time it happens it always ends up being temporary. You may as well argue that the telecom industry should have less employees now than in the past because automated switchboards replaced manual switchboards.

And off on a tangent, UBI is a retarded concept that won't help anything. People assume that income inequality actually matters, but in reality it's irrelevant. What is relevant and important is consumption inequality. For perspective, slashdot had an article that explained that $100,000 a year income is considered low income in San Francisco, yet that's considered high income in most other major cities. Why is this? Because costs of consumption vary by region.

UBI may increase incomes (it certainly won't do any favors for income inequality, by the way,) but it won't help consumption inequality at all, and will probably just make it worse.

Re:San Franciso

[Waffle Iron]

I'm calling BS on anybody who thinks automation will make human labor obsolete or will otherwise result in long-term job losses. Yes, frictional unemployment is a real thing, but every time it happens it always ends up being temporary.

That will certainly change once the intellectual ability relevant to business tasks contained in a machine matches that of the median human employee. It won't just be a race against simple mechanical contraptions and dumb state machines any longer.

Just because you have observed some trend in the past, it doesn't mean that trend will necessarily continue forever, especially when the fundamentals behind that trend are changing radically.

What is a "Robot?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Traffic lights? Cellular Phones? Urinals? Where does it begin or end?

Re:What is a "Robot?"

[0100010001010011]

"an apparatus using or applying mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task."

So a Centrifugal governor? Stealing jobs of engineers since 1788.

The hydraulics of a tractor plow? I demand my son a be able to have the opportunity to manually put all of those plows in the ground.

How many more people could be employed if we rid ourselves of the water wheel? I demand future generations have the opportunity to walk in a circle milling our grain.

Funds Likely Won't be Used to Help Impacted Worker

[Koreantoast]

While theoretically this might be a valuable way to help raise funds to support impacted low income workers, I'm skeptical that the funds raised, especially if successful, will actually go to help them. More likely than not, if San Francisco goes through with it, they'll just take the money to shore up the general tax base, enrich civil workers, or maybe a bit of pork for donors and the elite. Perhaps they'll say the money went to help an existing training center with a token set of new training manuals or something before the rest of the money is funneled to other pet projects. Then they'll go back and say they need a new tax to raise new funds. So unless they tie the launching of a specific new recurring initiative with the tax, it just feels like a money grab by the city government.

It's because of American's distorte view on taxes

[rsilvergun]

we've got a very regressive tax system. Instead of demanding that get fixed we just keep demanding more tax breaks. The tax breaks go to the very rich, gov'ts run out of money & can't raise taxes on the rich so they raise taxes on the poor through new regressive taxes. Lather, rinse, repeat. There's a name for it. It's called "Starve the Beast". It means intentionally breaking the government so people lose faith in it. It's really a form of terrorism ( inciting fear for political gain, what else would you call it?) but that word is so loaded nowadays you can't use it for anything meaningful.

Or--hear me out, I know it sounds crazy--we could

[RightwingNutjob]

NOT tax "robots" and let the markets evolve with changing technology.

People out of work will find new jobs, or new places to live that aren't as over-priced as SF.
Companies will find the right balance of automation and the human touch in customer-facing positions.
And the government will avoid yet another lurch into Venezualan socialism by promising everything to everyone at the expense of Those People.

Oy

[fyngyrz]

Punitively taxing progress in order to protect the buggy whip.

Yeah, this is sure to work out for the best.