Down here in Texas... 
we have a saying--
"Git... 
a rope!"
Posted on 02/17/2017 11:49:37 PM PST by nickcarraway
Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and world’s richest man, said in an interview Friday that robots that steal human jobs should pay their fair share of taxes.
“Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, Social Security tax, all those things,” he said. “If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”
Gates made the remark during an interview with Quartz. He said robot taxes could help fund projects like caring for the elderly or working with children in school. Quartz reported that European Union lawmakers considered a proposal to tax robots in the past. The law was rejected.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
“How is that lower half of the bell curve expected to survive?”
Develop a skill set that cannot be duplicated by a robot.
However, there will be a tipping point where robots displace such a large amount of workers that there will no longer be enough consumers to float the economy and at that point there is not demand for robots.
I predicted this a couple of years ago, when they first started pushing for $15 minimum wage.
The natural reaction of the fast food restaurants and retail stores would be to lay off workers and replace them with robots, causing more people to get on the government dole.
This in turn would cause a counter reaction by the government to try to get money to pay for the higher welfare costs. The obvious source is to tax the robots, probably by an amount similar to what the employee that the robot replaced made.
It’ll be interesting to see what the business owners would do in such a case. For the same expense, would they rather have a robot, or a human?
In either case, the final outcome will be higher prices and inflation.
What skill set can robots not eventually develop?
yup, I agree with others here Bill Gates needs to pay taxes, retroactive, for all the computers using his systems/programs, etc that are doing the work of multiple people for years already.
Funny he should think of just taxing “robots” now, not realizing the people his business has put out of work over recent decades. Sure he has employed some people but he’s also created/initiated loss of jobs.
Down here in Texas... we have a saying--
"Git... a rope!"
“How is that lower half of the bell curve expected to survive?”
They can get robots.
Re: “The point is ....how is civilization going to cope with machinery doing the labor that the overwhelming majority of humans used to do. How is that lower half of the bell curve expected to survive?”
Two things will happen.
First, money that used to go to employees will flow directly to the owner or the corporation as profits.
Those profits will typically be taxed at much higher rates than the average tax rate paid by the former employees.
Thus, tax revenue paid to various governments will increase dramatically.
However, governments will need to subsidize many more citizens and residents, so the surplus will be short lived.
However, as robotic technology spreads across the world, the price of goods will begin to rapidly decline.
Thus, government subsidies in developed countries will enable most people to maintain a middle class standard of living - even if they have no work income at all.
I like it. In four years all of those robots will be voting Republican!
If we tax them, next thing you know they’ll unionize, and one of their top demands will be robot suffrage. We’re doomed.
To a large degree robots and fixed high speed tooling are interchangeable. Taxes on all of that come through corporate profit taxation. Gates needs to have his wealth nationalized, for the children.
How’s your buggy whip stock doing?
0bama stuttering?
“Those profits will typically be taxed at much higher rates”
That’s the lib prescription. Tax the rich and move the poor into wellfare.
That’s not new. Robots will have the same impact as Asia stealing manufacturing jobs in the 70’s. Reagan proved that the lib prescription does not work.
Are you going to pay the robot, too?
I don’t believe taxing robots will work, but without a doubt what is happening right now in technology - low cost robots and driverless cars - are going to disrupt the low-skilled worker workforce like never before, in the next few years and decades.
The constant drive for more money (i.e. $15/hr min wage) does nothing but make the already improving break-even price point for replacing jobs with robots that much better.
All the more reason to stop the flow of low-skilled immigrants (legal and illegal) into this country. There are truly NOT going to be enough jobs for these people in the future - there will barely be enough for the people already here.
I’d say better than your reasoning
Embedded software and Unix/linux can easily replace Windoz. Had Gates not been there with his S/W licensing model, someone else would have produced equivalent s/w. IBM were foolish. DEC too. Gates didn’t produce Visicalc.
surely this is satire
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