Posted on 03/03/2017 12:50:10 PM PST by C19fan
valid points @ post 5
The shift to AI and robotics replacing workers in many occupations and jobs is inevitable. It will mean that the rich become wealthier no matter what taxes they levy on the machine. You are also correct that consumers will pay the tax - we always do. There is little doubt that it will create some upheaval in our societal model in the form of adjusted revenues, etc. That is why it is probably one of the most interesting discussions regarding the future.
Ironically, at dinner with some friends and a pro-immigration moderate finally admitted that given the future of AI and robotics the last thing we should be doing is taking in millions of uneducated immigrants who have little chance of success in such a world. He even admitted this was especially true given our entitlement programs.
I pray for the day that robotic pickers are in full use in the field of agriculture. There are so many towns that are absolute testaments to the dangers of immigrant labor pools. Many of the orchards and farmers in Washington have become quite wealthy as the quality of the schools, hospital, and infrastructure in their community have dropped continually due to the labor for “their” business. Under our current system they a great business model - pay low wages for hard labor and if they are injured or you fire them it costs you nothing (unlike legitimate businesses). Your community pays for it.
This isn’t a “lazy union workers vs. Wise investors” type of situation. It literally transcends all previous thought on economics. I can guarantee one thing — when 85% of us don’t have jobs, those who “invest wisely and develop their companies,” the Bezos’ and Gates’ and Soros’ of the world, newly minted trillionaires all, will be calling the shots entirely and will decide that you and a few billion others filthy carbon-emitting peasants are excess strain on the environment.
Interesting, but there is precedent for this. The mining barons back in the day had this kind of control over their local (and even state) politics. The more things change the more they stay the same?
That sounds a lot like the far left enviros who view humanity as a disease on the planet and want a radical population reduction.
What robots will actually do is bring about socialism if not outright communism in many nations. Those left out of robotworld prosperity will not sit around and allow a tiny percentage of the population to own all the productive capacity and assets.
Get ready for the most gigantic, redistributionist central government not yet imagined by man.
The framework for the answer to your question is already out there... Initially, the taxes on robots would be used for worker training programs for displaced workers (translation: whomever we decide to pay to babysit people for a couple years.)
And ‘as robots expands even more’ these taxes would be used for ‘worker wage replacement programs’ - paying people not to work.
And how would all of this be paid for? Hey, Obama raised the debt by more than 8 trillion dollars with hardly a peep from most economists; expanding it by another 16 or 32 trillion would hardly bring much more comment, right? In other words, it’ll start out as a tax, it’ll become an entitlement, and we’ll just print as much money as needed. (shush about that silly inflation thing...)
A cheaper solution is lowering the minimum wage so that human labor isn’t so expensive that all this automation is attractive.
Robots would be business equipment.
We already pay for business equipmnt and any taxes as thy are calculated into the price, and the taxes on the goods/services.
So anyone rooting for this is just rooting to pay more.
can robots be used to create “protest mobs”.
could robots be used to telepresense protesters? how many would really be there at the protest?
forget free money, would leftist protesters do anything at all if given free pot?
Low interest rates are helping this trend. It doesn’t take much of a return on investment to justify borrowing at such low rates.
The social costs of people not working and breakdown of the family are going to dwarf the benefits from automation. People need more than bread and circuses.
Unfortunately, a sufficiently large proportion of a society that is young, primarily male and with nothing useful to do will destabilize that society and do their level best to destroy society. Don't know the solution, but the Muslim, permanently dysfunctional countries in the Middle East are a screaming warning of what can happen
It will take 3 robots to replace my productivity then the govt can pay me $120k a year to enlighten soceity as a professional poet. It will require I spend lots of time alone in my nothing box mediating on my last prose.
Clarke figured it that robots would eventually be banned from the earth except for the massive ai that controlled the economy. Nancy kress postulated that a sort of guaranteed minimum wage was needed but that left the majority as a barely literate underclass. Most other authors’ hinge on a technological singularity. It’s our best bet to be sure but as long as we have to code with our monkey hands developing a true ai might be farther away then we think.
Population control is already in play if anyone cares to believe some of the fringe out there.
One problem with this premise: There needs to be consumers in the first place. Thus, after whatever event takes much of the overburden of human population robots will have their place but it won’t be a major factor.
We are not in a technical revolution, but a cultural revolution borne of a 2-pronged disaster worldwide: Fiscal & population. This technical ‘evolution’ is merely one more phase for which our economy will adapt if all the jobs aren’t permitted to be outsourced elsewhere.
> “How is society going to work when only the top 20% have the cognitive skills to have a job while the remaining 80% are rendered worthless by AI and robotics?”
THANK YOU! This is the question that not NEARLY enough people are asking and nobody seems to have a viable solution to except legally limiting automation, which I guarantee the 1% will not let happen.
What we’re facing transcends traditional economic discussion entirely.
@Will88 - I have to say this is one of the very likely possibilities. Even people like me who is virulently against communism is facing the prospect of having our backs to the wall due to automation and far too few entry level jobs paying far too little to pay the bills. At some point if a better solution isn’t forthcoming we may have to turn to some kind of limited socialism just for our own survival.
This is also a big issue that isn’t being discussed enough. We have the exact same problem in America. Except that instead of being caused by religious polygamy a huge percentage of women are either a bad candidate for marriage due to the mental illness now proudly called ‘feminism’, divorce is far too easy to obtain,
So you have an increasing number of young men who can’t satisfy their God-given desire for a woman’s love in the way He intended. This already has all kinds of lovely side effects like rampant infanticide, STDs spreading like wildfire and illegitimate births. But it also has a delayed economic effect when native-born families are reduced in size or not started because Bobby doesn’t have two dollars to rub together to buy Betty an engagement ring much less afford kids. Coupled with the aforementioned infanticide, the nation’s middle class is crumbling.
I state this as bluntly as I can: capitalism ain’t gonna work when enough young men are broke and can’t get a wife. At ‘best’ we’ll have a massive underclass of ruffians. At worst our society simply falls apart at the seams.
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