
The idea of a 'robot tax' is gaining steam - elorant
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/robot-tax-gains-steam-job-killing-automation-work-economy-2020-1-1028807242
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maxharris
What are the goals here? Is it to maximize the production of the stuff of our
lives so that it is available at the highest quality and lowest price
possible, requiring the least amount of human toil? (It helps to think about
where shoes, houses, food, entertainment, clothing, medicine and all the rest
comes from.)

Or is the goal to _inhibit_ change, so that people don't have to apply their
minds to figure out how and where they fit into a rapidly changing
(improving?) world?

Let's leave aside issues of class and envy, because I think that's a related,
but secondary issue that is (at least in part) resolved by the answer to the
above.

~~~
mmcconnell1618
One of the big goals is to provide time for workers to either retire or
retrain for different careers. Right now, a company can buy a robot (capital
expense that they depreciate) and the worker is out of job with the
possibility of a little severance pay and some unemployment for a short time.
A tax that targeted jobs that have been automated away could be used to fund
retraining programs and help those displaced workers find new careers.

~~~
maxharris
Why not go the other way and encourage changes in society that reduce the cost
of living?

For example, here in California there is a severe housing shortage, and it is
widely agreed that the difference between us cheaper places are the
restrictions placed by our own laws. Supply is therefore artificially limited.

This is on my mind because I am unemployed and living off of my savings. I
don't want to be told what to do all day, and I don't want handouts either. I
just want to have the option of going my own way, and to get a square deal on
the things I buy.

~~~
esotericn
The only way we have for limiting population influx into "preferable" regions
is cost.

At the moment we pretty much let people duke it out economically. If you're
productive enough (yes, I'm aware of the flaws there) then you get to live in
X area.

Without that I'm not sure how any sort ot UBI can work unless you want to have
arbitrary barriers around regions. What's the path for a younger version of me
to move from my hometown to London in this world in which my work is
valueless?

~~~
pharke
I don't think cost is the main limit on population density in preferable
regions. I would think zoning plays a larger role and likely drives cost. I
also don't think we necessarily have a real limit on the number of preferable
regions other than land area. Most of what makes a location desirable are the
amenities that it has access to, we know how to build schools, hospitals,
libraries, parks, and other public services. Rather than making people duke it
out for access to such things, maybe we should consider making more of those
things available to people?

~~~
esotericn
You can build more, but there will still be competition for what's there. Look
at Manhattan as an example.

I'm not sure it's even possible to overbuild in an area that's not
economically depressed. If London had three times the indoor residential area,
a very possible case would be that it's still expensive, but that people
previously living in small flats end up with larger ones or terraced houses
etc.

It's hard to imagine how the poor are ever going to be able to meaningfully
compete with people who have (at a minimum) hundreds of thousands of pounds of
capital. The bottom tier of worker will be bid to their limit at almost any
size of dwelling I would think.

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michaelbuckbee
An interesting aspect of this is that the definition of both "robot" and
"automated" is terrifically fluid.

There are all sorts of productivity advancing tools that tread the line.

If I told you I'd built a machine that halved the number of people/time that
it took to unload a truck full of boxes you might think that it pretty clearly
would fall under this but take a look at the device:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzxiXYJqLn4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzxiXYJqLn4)

I'm still pitching Buckbee's law: "A robot's utility is inversely proportional
to how much it looks like a robot." and in practice, I think you'd find that
almost every real gain in productivity doesn't actually look like a "robot".

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dyeje
I'm surprised by the reaction here. It seems fairly intuitive to me. People
used to capture part of the value creation with their wages and they are being
replaced by robots. That value that used to circulate in the economy now just
goes to owners (wealthiest section of society) instead of circulating. This
just takes that same value back.

I don't know the best way to implement it, but I think it is necessary if you
want to prevent wealth inequality from getting worse, faster over time.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Generally, the most efficient thing to tax is the thing you don't want.

What you are proposing is a good thing (greater efficiency) with a negative
side effect (tilting economies towards the rich) but rather than tax the bad
thing, you're taxing the good thing in order to reduce its negative side
effect.

For whatever reason it seems like taxing robots is more socially acceptable
than taxing the wealthy.

~~~
keymone
You _really_ don’t want a couple million unemployed and unemployable citizens
at your doorstep one day angry for why they suddenly can’t afford to live. You
don’t want it as a government and you don’t want it as a company/corporation.

~~~
mirimir
Back in the 60s, there was the joke that it'd be less expensive to just bribe
the Vietnamese instead of fighting them.

~~~
pharke
Instead of dropping bombs they should have just dropped cigarettes, whiskey,
magazines, food, clothing and a variety of American consumer goods.

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mdorazio
A robot tax is the most ridiculously luddite political action I can think of.
How about instead of taxing technological progress we fix the tax system so it
actually profits and wealth accumulation.

~~~
alpineidyll3
The only way I can make sense of this is that the robots provide a surrogate
buffer for the wealthy to feel "less attacked". Sadly wealthy people are not
interested in the greatness of their planet or society anymore. Somehow they
think their private enterprises that serve ads are making society great or
leaving a legacy.

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flyGuyOnTheSly
I imagine this will be circumvented in similar novel ways much like the UK's
window tax [0] was centuries ago.

Multiple robots will be attached to one robot "brain" and argued that they are
all the same robot.

Or perhaps they will go the Volkswagen route and lie to government regulators.
Whenever the government bot taxers walk in the room, all of the bots stop
moving and act like smart compacting garbage cans.

Or perhaps costs of robots will dwindle so much that they will become
disposable. Come bot check day, the majority of the workforce will be
unrepairable and destined for the bin.

Or perhaps they're making high end CPUs with high margins that sell for $500
apiece, but the government thinks you're making plastic bags with low margins
that sell for $500/pallet.

This will never work imho... or rather, it will never be "fair".

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax)

~~~
csunbird
> At that time, many people in Britain opposed income tax, on principle,
> because the disclosure of personal income represented an unacceptable
> governmental intrusion into private matters, and a potential threat to
> personal liberty.[3] In fact the first permanent British income tax was not
> introduced until 1842, and the issue remained intensely controversial well
> into the 20th century.[4]

Oh, how times has changed...

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retrac
A robot is just another part of capital. Why not just tax capital directly?

~~~
big_chungus
Because there's a profoundly negative impact on investment and economic
growth. Maybe the 99% don't see as much direct impact from said growth, but it
stopping would still hurt them greatly.

As an aside, what you're describing is not a tax. There's neither a
transaction nor any exchange of good or service involved. It's a direct
confiscation of wealth, currently unconstitutional, and I'd call it theft.
It's not skimming off the top of a transaction, it's literally the feds
reaching into your pocket and calling that money theirs because enough other
people said it was okay. It doesn't magically become not theft because the
thief has a badge or a "democratic mandate" (enough others saying that yes,
they do indeed want your money).

~~~
retrac
I'm not sure that the argument about disincentive is any different from taxing
income. We want to encourage both wealth and income, and taxing them does
discourage them. But the fact that taxing income discourages people from
getting income isn't a strong argument against income taxation altogether.

I'm not American, so the unconstitutional argument doesn't mean much to me.
But doesn't the USA have property taxation for land? Wouldn't your arguments
apply to the property tax in most states? It's nothing more than the
government saying you owe money because you own wealth (in the form of land).
Are property taxes theft? Unconstitutional?

~~~
big_chungus
Absolutely it's different from taxing income; it demands liquidity. I.e. an
entrepreneur with a billion dollars in stock has a net worth made mostly of
"paper gains". Very little of that is likely liquid. By letting the money
continue to work as an investment, it can keep growing and producing returns.
Effectively adding liquidity requirements for private investment would be
devastating.

> doesn't the USA have property taxation for land

That's state-level, not federal; the constitution gives the feds no power to
confiscate capital. More importantly, it's a direct fifth amendment violation:

> nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just
> compensation.

Not only is there no enumerated power (enough to make it unconstitutional),
there's a specific prohibition.

That said, I'm not a huge property tax fan, either. I'd rather the gov't just
bill each citizen for services used as an average, at least at the federal
level.

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sdfin
Would a washing machine count as a robot?

~~~
sokoloff
Depending on how defined, it could easily include: a self-service elevator, 3D
printers, CNC mills and lathes, a farm combine, automobile service lifts, farm
irrigation, power tools, construction equipment, pneumatic tools, power
screwdrivers, a dishwasher, an automated telephone exchange, internal
combustion engines [or even steam engines for that matter], intermodal
container systems, an IVR, spreadsheets, word processors, microwave ovens,
lawn mowers, leaf blowers, hedge trimmers, automated boilers, sous vide
circulators, any web-based order lookup system, automated parcel sortation
machines, possibly all of e-commerce...

It seems _insane_ to me that we’d seek to tax productivity improvements in
order to encourage maximizing the amount of human labor required to accomplish
a given outcome.

“Spoons Not Shovels!” [https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-
shovels/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/)

------
Waterluvian
We need this. And computer tax. And car tax. And refrigerator tax.

But not just a one off tax. A recurring tax to capture all the efficiency and
job loss the horse and buggy industry , secretaries, ice delivery industry,
etc. have incurred.

------
mirimir
Maybe fund guaranteed minimum income with taxes on automation.

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Ericson2314
And doom us to low wage low productivity feudalism. No thanks.

~~~
Angostura
Surely doom us to a life where the robots do the work and we lead interesting
lives of leisure

~~~
big_chungus
> and we lead interesting lives of leisure

We'd like to think this, and maybe some would do "interesting" things, but the
fact is that most people turn into couch potatoes. People who retire early
tend to die early; stop working and so will your body.

~~~
anon9001
> but the fact is that most people turn into couch potatoes

> stop working and so will your body

Citation badly needed here.

I can tell you that before my peers joined the workforce, everyone was part of
sports and clubs and community activities. After they joined the workforce,
that stuff largely dropped away, because work is too time consuming.

~~~
big_chungus
> Citation badly needed here

Fair enough.

[https://www.nber.org/papers/w24127](https://www.nber.org/papers/w24127)

[https://jech.bmj.com/content/70/9/917.full](https://jech.bmj.com/content/70/9/917.full)

[https://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c6089](https://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c6089)

~~~
anon9001
Well, sure, if you consider 55 as early retirement, I could see how people
would be ready to check out and do nothing. These are people that have likely
worked full time for the last 30+ years.

What I want to know is what happens at scale if people retire at 30 or 40, or
maybe if they never work at all. The idea is that automation might free up
people from work entirely. I don't think it's fair to extrapolate data from
people who have been working for 30+ years and then had an "early" retirement.

~~~
big_chungus
You're right that it's a loose extrapolation at best, but it's rather the best
data we have, or at least the best data of which I'm aware. You asked for
citations for my claims, and I provided them; I'm showing what happens when
people _stop_ working early, not when people never really start or don't for
long.

That aside, a society in which no one supports himself but rather is dependent
on the noblesse oblige of the state to survive is a dystopia I hope never to
see.

------
carapace
> a so-called "robot tax" faces significant hurdles in design and
> implementation.

To put it mildly.

I want to make litter-bots: Imagine a ladybug about the size of half a
beachball. It crawls around and collects litter. It's _mostly_ autonomous, but
to really do a good job it needs a minder, a human "oracle" for navigation and
trash?y/N queries, etc. (The minders do not necessarily have to be physically
nearby to the 'bots.) ML advancements have drastically reduced the amount of
human oversight needed but _not_ eliminated it entirely.

In that context, what should the _economic_ relationship be between the
minders, the clients, and the robot factory? (Consider that the robot factory
is likely very automated, a robot robot-factory.)

FWIW, I had originally thought I would set up a kind of volunteer distributed
remote workforce with a UI that folks would play like a game.

Another possibility would be to sell or lease 'bots to operators, who are then
responsible for finding their own contracts. The litter-bots would be akin to
landscaper's tools (like an AI leaf-blower or chainsaw.) "Let the robots do
the work and we'll take their pay."

I do NOT think it would be useful to for the government to tax my litter-bot-
company's robots and then somehow redistribute that to... whom, exactly?

I am in favor of Universal Basic Income, but only when the robots are good
enough to seriously impact the average person's ability to compete in the job
market and get work. (Like, me. If I wasn't good at computers I'd probably be
homeless!) A given economic regime must provide jobs or bread or "you're gonna
have a bad time."

I think we're at the tipping point: the hardware is COTS (Common Off-The-
Shelf) the software is coming together nicely. There are already robot vacuum
cleaners and lawnmowers that work pretty well, etc.

So, yeah, what's the _economic_ program for the automation revolution? Lords
and serfs? Or some sort of Marxist distributed ownership of the "means of
production"? (Probably not: even the communists didn't actually go through
with that in the end, eh?)

Why is Daiso so much more popular than RepRaps?

~~~
pdimitar
> _I do NOT think it would be useful to for the government to tax my litter-
> bot-company 's robots and then somehow redistribute that to... whom,
> exactly?_

As much as I think a robot tax looks to be one of very few possible ways to
improve current situation, I also agree with you that the whole thing isn't
well-explained or argued for. It does sound like this: "government vacuums
even more money but 10 years later, people still live under bridges or in
slums". Sadly, knowing the average politician's thought process, the odds of
us ending with an economic inequality shifted from corporations to governments
is extremely likely. We the people are greedy no matter what positions we
occupy...

> _" Let the robots do the work and we'll take their pay."_

I like that a lot, actually. It's a much better idea. Robot goes to work in my
name sake, I get money wired in my account and I get the final say in what
does the robot do and when. The reliability of the transaction hinges on
economical interest (I want the robot to work with a stable schedule N hours a
day because that makes me money).

Really neat idea.

~~~
carapace
Cheers! I can't take credit tho. I believe it was Dr. Philo Drummond or the
NENSLO who said it first.

