Bill Gates "Robot Tax" Disaster or Salvation?
In the second video of my Techonomics series I discuss Bill Gates' recent "proposal" for taxing robots. I use quotes there because, well, there isn't really a proposal ... and it's not really a tax on robots. It's really the claim that addressing the issue of job loss due to automation is as simple as "taxing the robot like a human," though Gates later in the video (which you can view for yourself here) admits quite sheepishly at the very end is obviously really a tax on humans like the people at the robot company who he thinks won't "be outraged that there might be tax," as if this is the most important part of the question, as opposed to a trivial and frankly irrelevant detail.
There Is Nothing Simple About Technological Disruption
Technological innovation and disruption are very complicated issues and so it is not with the idea of a "robot tax" specifically that I take issue, but the foundational assumption behind this argument which is that the solution is as simple as he pretends. In fact, I would go as far as saying that since this is so obviously true, that must mean that Gates is either being intentionally deceptive or willfully ignorant for claiming otherwise. In the following video, I do my best to approach this question from as fair and unbiased a perspective as I can, relying primarily on the arguments made by Former Greek Finance Minister and Professor of Economics Yanis Varoufakis in an article titled A Tax on Robots in Project Syndicate. I hope you like it.
He have thought: "I've got a great success with the idiot tax making millions of people to pay for run a crap low performance virus prone OS. I'm sadistic and will to continue..." :-)
PS: I'm from 2005 an happy Linux user :-P
AAAAAhahaha...
Windows user hangs his head in shame :(
I wouldn't go as far as to call windows users idots, I think its more likely market domination and lack of computers pre installed with linux for the average user. I am a big linux fan and you can do so much more with it, but I still keep a windows box around for some things. Wine can help with many old programs, but windows is fully entrenched in the business world.
"I wouldn't go as far as to call windows users idots"
Oh sure I wouldn't offend anyone but just to be ironic. I understand perfectly that most of the people for many reasons can't afford an OS with 1% share market and an heavy lack of native software.
i am agree with you bro
jesus christ if something is automated at least let everybody benifit from it instead of the one rich lucky asshole at the top
eventually everything will be automated........ are we just going to let 99.9% of the population starve because "meh private property i made off of the poor working for me because I lucked out"
hahaha
All bill gates's eugenics funding taxes can be easily by-passed on sites such as this (I hope nobody actually pays for windows):
http://1337x.to/torrent/899077/Windows-7-SP1-Ultimate-32-Bit/
han är en bra man thanks
#taxationistheftification
Complex issue... we can be outraged to our hearts' content, but functionally speaking humans will continue to be replaced by automation to where we will barely even recognize what it means to "work," 50 years from now. So if 70% of the adult population will be simply not needed to performs work, we still have to do something, presuming everyone still needs to eat and sleep somewhere... which costs money, so unless we're willing to become a giant pile of corpses on a back lot somewhere, answers have to be found.
I'm no genius with the answers... but there seems to be a lot of underestimation of the sheer magnitude with which "work" will simply "go away."
If automation replaced the need for human labor, we would have massive unemployment right now. Instead, it multiplies labor and allows exploration of new industries that were previously out of reach. Involuntary unemployment is political rather than economic.
@jacobtothe, you might find this short documentary interesting... of course, it only illustrates one possible outcome, but it seems quite likely:
This is a good conversation to be having and interesting questions. I find it kind of funny when people say, "This time automation is different." It's always different. None of this is to say that we shouldn't DO anything, it's just to say that the solution proposed is no solution at all. It's a reflection of what I call the "do SOMETHING" bias, which is the idea that it's always better to do something, rather than nothing. And that combines with Status Quo bias to make that "something" NOT something innovative and efficient, but some solution we think worked in the past and so believe will work in the future ... but it won't. The problem isn't "robots" or "automation" that's as nonsensical as saying that the problem with war is "hate." You can't stop hate, and you can't stop innovation because all you do when you try to is create incentive to innovate around the obstacles you create. The problem is the method through which we generate money and the system we use to distribute that money. Automation, for example, is incentivized through our system which distributes currency almost entirely through banks and then corporations, and then we try to manipulate them to act in certain ways through things like minimum wage laws and taxes, most of which, in the aggregate, make it beneficial for them to replace humans with robots. Automation was not an inevitable consequence technological evolution, it is a response to the incentive structures created by our faulty system. We need to build better systems, not double down on old, inefficient, and ineffective solutions. Thanks for the comments! I think this will make good subject matter for a future video!
@andrarchy, agreed-- it's ultimately our paradigms that are screwed up.
As I recall, the original idealistic intent of automation has always been that it sould "increase leisure time." This ideal was even refreshed a little right after World War II. Whereas that's likely a noble thought, it runs head-first into the reality that automation "produces" things, and our so-called "rules" of life are that one must pay for things, and paying involves money, and money is something you get for working at something... and now we are at cross purposes where the humans are no longer needed to work, and yet they "must" work in order to have this "money" supposedly needed to acquire the products/production output coming from automation. So, something has to give.
I look forward to seeing your further explorations of this!
There was no intent behind automation. Humans are tools makers. It's what we do. The idea that someone said, "Hey would should automate stuff," and then other people said, "Yeah that sounds like a great idea let's do this!" Is not just improbable, but it's objectively not what happened. We have been "automating" since we became human. We build tools. Robots are tools. There was no idealistic intent, though maybe there were idealistic rationalizations made by people who were observing a phenomena and who didn't understand it, but the idea that "automation" was an intentional act makes no sense. We build things that make our lives easier, and we work with other people each motivated by their own beliefs and ambitions to build more complicated things that make life easier. We live in a world of incredibly complicated things and so the number of people required to build them are unimaginable. Often those things (tools) lessen the amount of human labor required to do other things. That's automation. It's been around forever.
100% employment is the entire family working from dawn to dusk to avoid starvation in subsistence living. That is not progress.
It's sensationalist fearmonging, not good economics.
The couple of people I personally know whose jobs at Safeway and Home Depot were replaced with a self-checkout stand would probably take issue with that assertion... but I'll leave it alone, otherwise.
I should probably just write a long post on this subject with lots of links to outside articles. Employment is a huge subject with lots of factors to consider. But to point out a specific example and say "robots mean unemployment" is far too simplistic, disregarding so many factors that it is absurd.