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