San Francisco Politician Jane Kim Is Exploring a Tax On Robots (businessinsider.com) 239
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.
San Franciso (Score:2, Insightful)
Highest tax rate in the Western Hemisphere and constantly bankrupt.
Re:San Franciso (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there none of them, that come from the regular people pool that know we pay too much already, and could better keep and spend our own money rather than find some new, creative way to give to the a bloated bureaucracy and hope they can spend it better than we that earned it can?!?!?!
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Apparently, you consider sitting around and letting robots do work for you to be "earning".
Re:San Franciso (Score:4, Insightful)
Apparently, you consider sitting around and letting robots do work for you to be "earning".
Well, how are we going to define a robot? If it's a machine that can accomplish physical tasks automatically without human input, then it's quite broad; calculators would be included, for example.
At work I was asked to configure a bunch of switches (about 70) with the same command set with small variation, and it was expected to take about a day to do, which would mean I'd have to manually open an SSH session numerous times. Instead I just wrote a script in 10 minutes that completed the job in 5 minutes.
Does that mean I'd have to pay a tax? If so, that's absurd, and I'd fight that tooth and nail.
We can't just tax shit just because somebody came up with a way to automate it, otherwise the tech industry itself would have to be taxed to basically nonexistence. The word "computer" used to refer to a person, whereas nowadays it refers to an object. The economy simply cannot scale without automation, and it will severely hamper growth if we have to tax every little thing that gets automated.
By the way, 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. You may as well argue that the telecom industry should have less employees now than in the past because automated switchboards replaced manual switchboards.
And off on a tangent, UBI is a retarded concept that won't help anything. People assume that income inequality actually matters, but in reality it's irrelevant. What is relevant and important is consumption inequality. For perspective, slashdot had an article that explained that $100,000 a year income is considered low income in San Francisco, yet that's considered high income in most other major cities. Why is this? Because costs of consumption vary by region.
UBI may increase incomes (it certainly won't do any favors for income inequality, by the way,) but it won't help consumption inequality at all, and will probably just make it worse.
Re:San Franciso (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Let's suppose the trend does end: Who will buy your automatically produced goods if nobody has any money to do so? If that truly was the case, then you'd be looking at more of a Star Trek style economy, and money would become mostly irrelevant. In such a scenario, consumption inequality would likely still be a thing, but a basic income would be rather pointless, as would any other form of money redistribution.
I honestly don't think it will come to that though. Instead what will happen is personal goods you
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Let's suppose the trend does end: Who will buy your automatically produced goods if nobody has any money to do so?
That's exactly why so many of us are worried about the rapid rise of automation and machine learning! As the AC below noted, it's likely to cause massive economic issues as this picks up speed.
Does that mean we have less demand for mathematician jobs than we otherwise would? You bet. But instead the mathematicians we do have are now solving more complex problems, and are overall more wealthy than they would have been if there weren't computers.
That's a cute analogy, but it doesn't cover the millions and millions of people that are going to be out of work in the next 10-15 years. Computers and switchboards only impacted very narrow job categories that not a lot of people were doing. There are millions and millions of truck drivers, warehouse workers, and fa
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Don't forget that robots by themselves do nothing, you need to power them, provide them with the appropriate materials, maintain them, and market the output.
Most of those activities will eventually be automated as well.
Oy (Score:4, Insightful)
Punitively taxing progress in order to protect the buggy whip.
Yeah, this is sure to work out for the best.
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Has there EVER been a politician born that attained office that didn't thing of EVERYTHING they saw as a taxable opportunity???
You should really read the Dictator's Handbook. There is a reason why over time politicians begin to take a similar shape and it has a lot more to do with how power structures are formed than politicians just randomly looking at everything and wondering how they can tax it. ISBN: 978-1610391849 Sorry to sound like an advert but it really is a good book that talks about this very thing and why it's more common than not.
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You guys in America constantly whinge and whine about tax, but I think if you actually tried to look up the numbers, you would find that you are not even close to the top in any conceivable way. But maybe I shouldn't bee too dismissive; in Europe we pay far more in tax, but I think we have reason to feel that we get more back as well, such as universal, public health care and free education - in some countries even up to a masters degree or PhD.
What is a "Robot?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Traffic lights? Cellular Phones? Urinals? Where does it begin or end?
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Traffic lights? Cellular Phones? Urinals? Where does it begin or end?
That's the question. Define exactly which machines will be taxed, and how you intend to calculate the amount, then propose a tax. Till then its just talk.
Of course, we should tax the wealthy robots the most.
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"an apparatus using or applying mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task."
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Though to be honest, if you had a single light always on and mechanical flaps that raised and lowered to block color filters
Traffic lights, at least traditional ones, do have a mechanical timing mechanism which is a constantly rotating gear that additional modules are inserted containing a mechanical device to select which lighting circuit will be enabled.
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Re:What is a "Robot?" (Score:5, Insightful)
"an apparatus using or applying mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task."
So a Centrifugal governor [wikipedia.org]? Stealing jobs of engineers since 1788.
The hydraulics of a tractor plow? I demand my son a be able to have the opportunity to manually put all of those plows in the ground [youtube.com].
How many more people could be employed if we rid ourselves of the water wheel? [wikipedia.org] I demand future generations have the opportunity to walk in a circle milling our grain.
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neither one of those things could ever classify as a robot. No moving parts in either. 1 it is a machine, neither a light nor a cell phone can be considered machines.
Yet look at how many jobs traffic lights stole from honest humans. There used to be a traffic policeman at every major intersection directing traffic. All those jobs were lost to automation just as surely as a housekeeper replaced by a hotel's towel delivery robot.
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A robot is a machine that can be programmed to perform a variety of complex sequences of actions (e.g. an industrial robot in a car factory). This is in contrast to a machine performs a complex action for which it is mechanically specialized (e.g. a bottling machine at a brewery).
Naturally there is no perfectly sharp dividing line between the two. For example an industrial robot may have specialized attachments which allow it to weld, or to inspect welds for that matter. A bottling machine may be control
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A robot is a machine that can be programmed to perform a variety of complex sequences of actions (e.g. an industrial robot in a car factory). This is in contrast to a machine performs a complex action for which it is mechanically specialized (e.g. a bottling machine at a brewery).
So all those specialized welding robots aren't really robots? Same with all those plasma and laser metal cutters?
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If it could only perform a specific sequences of welding operations, I wouldn't count it as robot.
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It's obviously reprogrammable to perform welds in different positions, duh!
In order to be a robot, something has to make "its own" decisions. Yes, defined by programming, but onboard programming. If the machine has some kind of sensor on it, and makes decisions based on the sensor input without phoning some authority to ask it what to do, then it is a robot. A contact kill switch doesn't make something a robot, either, but if it's got a camera and can recognize a foreign object (or human) in the operating area and decide not to move until the way is clear, then it's a robot, becau
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I meant physical actions. A robot has to be able to physically manipulate the world.
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In San Francisco, jobs will merely be replaced by automation. Not robots. For that matter, this is merely an attempt by a politician to raise her profile after losing a bitter election last cycle.
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Most likely San Francisco has no jobs that would be replaced by things that look like 'robots.' Those are for manufacturing jobs.
Those are the jobs which will be replaced first, but there are a number of service jobs which are also going to go away. A number of cashier and counterperson jobs are probably about to vanish. Most fast food jobs are going away. Taxi drivers are about to become a thing of the past; I've only ever experienced crappy ones in SF so I'm not going to cry any tears for them, but that's a significant number of jobs. Many delivery jobs are about to go away, too.
It's also worth noticing that there are actually plen
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Taxi drivers are about to become a thing of the past...
Only if "about to" means "before our sun goes nova".
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5 years dude. Probably less. You've got not one but about ten of the biggest, best-resourced tech companies all heavily investing in products to achieve that. Do you seriously think all those people - already billionaires because of knowing what to invest in when - are putting their money into a pipe dream that will never pan out - it's happened on occasion in the past, but it's hardly the norm. These people are rich because they are good at spotting the next big thing and investing early. Or do you really
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This isn't a hard question (Score:2)
That's why this idea is getting traction. It's hard to understand why you would rob peter to pay paul and why wealth redistribution is a positive good. It's easy to understand "Tax the robots that took my jerb!". You want this, because the alternative is dystopia. Hell, we don't even have to question that. Go read up on what happened during the industrial revolution. There w
The devil is in the details... (Score:2, Interesting)
but we tax personal income, which will go away, so some replacement tax has to pay for it.
Defining "robot" is going to be the (really) tricky part.
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but we tax personal income, which will go away, so some replacement tax has to pay for it.
So tax corporate incomes. If they can't be profitable while paying taxes, someone else should get a chance to be more efficient. Tax personal incomes which are well over the median and tax all corporate incomes, done and done. There's no need to dick around with robot taxes.
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So tax corporate incomes
Like Apple's? We know how well that's worked...
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Indeed. The core problem brought by increasing automation (which is inevitable) is that the marginal utility of labor decreases.
However taxing 'robots' to solve this seems unwise. Robotics and machine learning powered automation increase efficiency, allowing higher productivity, As the companies' labor cost decline as a result, their profits can be taxed more without the overall tax burden on them increasing (as you're
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In the South during slavery days they taxed slaves. Robots are the mechanical version.
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I'm pretty sure we could come up with a definition for a robot. Some level of complexity that goes from being an actuator to being a mechanical robot.
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Simple. For tax purposes it's any mechanical device used for commercial purposes. YOUR washing machine won't be a robot - but the ones at the fully automated no-employees-at-all laundromat down the road would be, even if the only significant difference in the washing machine is that those have a coin-slot.
The interesting thing is that the specific business I chose already exists, and in fact, has existed for decades. It was an easy thing to fully automate. I've been using fully automated laundromats with ze
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The revenue generated by the income from those 250,000 government employees.
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And that will be a factor only until every other state, country, and town has the same problem with massive unemployment and they ALL start taxing the robots.
As a socialist who favors higher taxes, (Score:2)
I dislike the idea of a "robot tax", it seems counterproductive. If robots make business more efficient and more profitable than human employees do, then the solution to that is to tax the resultant company profits and invest those tax dollars wherever needed. Specifically taxing the use of robots forces needless inefficiency and thus brings in less tax revenue while preventing some types of businesses from being profitable / developing at all. It also needlessly forces people to work jobs that are so mind-
CLASS WARFARE! STOP FIGHTING BACK! (Score:2)
BWAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Seriously, this is going to end in blood. They're already trying to kill off the poor. You think the latest thing with the oxy epidemic killing off poor formerly middle-class white people is a coincidence?
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It's a pretty effing poor plan from your perspective. You must think crack was created and spread by the US government as well.
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or you could have a rational capital gains tax...
The problem is capital gains taxes become a race to the bottom. If we up our capital gains tax, investors will just move their money overseas where other countries who are happy to undercut the US.
There's a reason most tech companies are "Irish" corporations.
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The problem is capital gains taxes become a race to the bottom.
...just like everything else in capitalism.
It's because of American's distorte view on taxes (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's because of American's distorte view on tax (Score:4, Interesting)
The one thing it, and every other tax plan, gets wrong is classes of income. Unearned income is taxed less than earned income.. Capital gains is a low bracket. And taxes on people exclude corporations, which are legally persons, except for taxing. Tax corporations under the same rules as a single filer, and you'd solve all the revenue problems of the US, though you'd also crash the economy. But setting the income tax rate to 0% for the first $100k, and 1% after, for all persons, natural and artificial, then you'd solve the revenue issues, while not taxing any one person too much. 1% tax (no exemptions) isn't too high, but apply that to artificial persons as well as natural ones, and all the problems go away, and with minimal impact on the economy (other than to boost it, as people will have more and spend more).
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Which do you like more? A robot tax or an increase of your taxes by 2% or cutting the police department by 2% or cutting food support for the poor by 2%?
Why would police and food assistance be the *first* things you'd choose to cut...unless you intend to *punish* people for wishing to keep more of what they earned? How about we shut down some federal agencies, like the Dept. of Education, the TSA, DEA, etc? There's enough fat in the federal government to form a decent-sized planetary body (that's no moon)! How about making the federal government tighten *their* belts instead of forcing all of us to tighten our belts at gunpoint?
Strat
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... it is also efficient enough not to generate very large profits because its revenues and its operational expenses are not too far from each other.
The nonsense starts here, and just gets worse. Why the fuck do you think operational efficiency has an inverse correlation
with profits? In the real world, where everyone else lives, operational efficiencies increase profits, it doesn't decrease them.
Funds Likely Won't be Used to Help Impacted Worker (Score:4, Insightful)
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So you're saying we shouldn't tax robots because the people who the citizens of San Francisco elected cannot be trusted to spend the money wisely.
You're giving up too easy (Score:2)
After you get the money you have to put honest people in charge of it and kick them out if they become dishonest. Civilization isn't a one and done. There are no guiding principles that will lead to a decent society. You have to keep working at it non stop until the day you die.
Terrible Solution (Score:2)
A "robot tax" solves nothing. We need to find a way to move away from our dependence on currency to survive. Automation is a good thing that can help us *all* lead better, more fulfilling lives, but only if we work to put in places changes to end this horrible capitalist system that ties your entire identity to your job. What good is a robot tax going to do when *all* jobs are run by robots? That wouldn't even make any sense. The key here is finding a way to support each other and make sure that the am
Or--hear me out, I know it sounds crazy--we could (Score:2, Insightful)
People out of work will find new jobs, or new places to live that aren't as over-priced as SF.
Companies will find the right balance of automation and the human touch in customer-facing positions.
And the government will avoid yet another lurch into Venezualan socialism by promising everything to everyone at the expense of Those People.
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There is no reason not to tax robots. They are property used in a commercial endeavor. Since less people working will cut tax revenue it's a logical way of replacing that revenue.
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or, you could be like florida, not have income tax, and have a small sales tax instead. Of course in california, i'm sure theirs income tax AND sales tax. no wonder businesses want to leave.
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Florida has other taxes. They get you a lot of places. There are always property taxes.
No need to tax - End accelerated depreciation.. (Score:2)
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Taxes and government go hand in hand. There are certain functions that are required and funds for those things must be collected from somewhere. That stuff doesn't pay for itself.
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Like the
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- idiot.
Nice sig, but you left off any content.
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You can't tax revenue.
We do for people. Why not artificial people?
A company may live on a super thin margin (or even generate a loss),
And people don't?
explain how you will tax revenue and where exactly the money will come from if the revenue minus expenses = a negative number?
The same place where a company with a loss pays their payroll. Gosh, these questions are easy. Did you think about them before you posted them?
Taxing somebody on revenue who generated a loss is called bankrupting them.
Yet, they get property tax assessed, even if they operate at a loss. Their suppliers send them bills, even if they operate at a loss. That's called "bankrupting them". Business that can't make money go out of business. How is this news to you?
We tried that (Score:2)
As for Venezuela, they're a single product economy (oil) in free fall because the Saudis dropped a shit ton of the stuff to kill US Shale. In any sane world the rest of the planet would bail them out until the price of oil rebounded instead of gleefully reveling in their misfortune.
I got a
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People out of work will find new jobs, or new places to live that aren't as over-priced as SF.
Has it occurred to you that there are people in this world that simply don't have the mental or physical capability to compete with a robot? There is a very real risk that only the most intelligent (or connected) members of society will be able to find a job in the future. What happens to everyone else? Do they starve?
Better an excise tax on goods. (Score:2)
Tax all the cotton gins! (Score:2)
Wrong tax (Score:2)
A lot to respond to. (Score:2)
First, robots will not be stealing jobs, tech will create more than it takes, it always does, because we filled all the "neccessary" jobs centuries ago and most current work is luxury - and humans being greedy keep expanding the luxuries we decide are 'essential' - health care is a prime example.
That said, a robot tax is not a bad idea. It's a good way to tax the succesful businesses after they have advanced past the beginner stage and become profitable enough to automate.
Of course the real question is wha
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First, robots will not be stealing jobs, tech will create more than it takes...
Tell that to the eight hundred or so data entry clerks who weren't needed to scan forms or correct scan errors when the Australian Bureau of Statistics decided to do the 2016 census online. In fact, tell that to me, because I was one of them.
SF of all places (Score:2)
And how do you enforce this anyway? You can tax a building because it's stationary. You can tax a vehicle because it travels in public
So a VAT? (Score:2)
Here is an oversimplified thought experiment. Currently a minority productive subset of the population supports the rest of the population; i.e. 0 to 18 years kids are supported by their parents; 67 and up people are retired; students, disabled people and those who do not work for whatever reason are all provided for by the rest of society.
If non-human production takes over *all* jobs, automation will necessarily need to take the place of the product
SF City Budget is $9 billion (Score:4, Interesting)
Then vote (Score:2)
first, know the value of the work ... (Score:2)
One problem with taxing a robot is 'how much to charge?'. There is a similar challenge in the auto repair industry: how much to charge for ... changing a headlamp in a 2015 Toyota Corolla, for example. The answer is a bit complicated. There are books that document every possible repair procedure and the average time of each repair. If the headlamp is a 15 minute job then the customer will be charged for 15 minutes' labor, regardless of the actual time the mechanic takes.
When a robot takes a human task, that
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When a robot takes a human task, that human task should be measured similarly- how long would an average human take to do the job, and what pay grade would have applied? Then we know the value of the work, and the cost in human displacement, and we have a basis for taxing the robot.
And what about the work a human cannot do? Like searching a billion webpages for the one page you're looking for in less than a second? Or applying 50,000 tons of pressure to a piece of metal to bend it into shape?
A librarian can only sift through a dozen webpages every minute. If the government charged the tax based on how long a human takes to do the work, you'd be paying thousands of dollars in taxes each time you visit Google.
Here's an idea... (Score:3)
A tax on San Francisco Politicians?
Responding to the "800 lbs gorilla?" (Score:3)
Other day on PBS a panel discussion or the Newshour with presenters talking about political situations, one said something like "Nobody is addressing the 800 lbs gorilla that is automation which is expected to reduce large numbers of jobs in retail, insurance, groceries, etc. in the next 10 to 20 years."
Which technological changes, people and the politicians they elect tend to react to the results of those changes rather than dealing with implementation. Also much of the wealth in SF bay area is difficult to tax, so go after easy stuff like sales tax and gas tax. I'm not sure how you would tax a robot, first have to define a robot (Roombas, traffic lights, urinals?), is the robot doing revenue producing work or some thing else not financially related?
"Human displacement" (Score:2)
Do you know what else, besides robots, displaces humans?
Other humans.
"Kill them all," is what the robot economist just heard Jane Kim say is desired. You were so worried about robots stealing your job, that you just authorized the production of Terminators.
Butlerian Jihad (Score:3)
This could work. We'd need some form of Great Convention that carefully describes the limits of what is and what isn't a robot - is an alarm clock a robot? Is a washing machine? How about a lawn sprinkler system with a timer? Elevators? Coffee Machines? Snack dispensers? How much automation is permitted in factory machinery? Can this process be regulated by a sensor and a timer, or is that a robot too? Do they have to hire a guy with an egg-timer to stand there and throw a lever instead?
Having made this distinction, businesses will then crowd up against either side of this imaginary barrier; on one side, engineers simplifying systems until they are no longer sufficiently robotic to be taxed, and on the other side Servok craftsmen pushing the limits of the Great Convention up to where their mechanisms might be taxed. There would be jobs for assessors, there would be jobs for screaming torch-bearing mobs chanting "THOU SHALT NOT BUILD A MACHINE IN THE LIKENESS OF THE HUMAN SOUL!" as they drag computers and programmers alike from their offices and destroy them.
It might not make a great novel in itself, but it'd be good background material for one.
Totally Wrong Idea (Score:2)
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Think for a moment about machines that can build a $15,000 dollar home that is superior to a $100,000 dollar home.
I've thought for a moment, and I can't quite imagine that happening. I can imagine a $15k home which is superior to a typical $100k home, using alternative construction, but I can't see how it's going to become cost-effective to have one machine construct it.
what's a robot? (Score:2)
A simpler way (Score:2)
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a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer.
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Taxes on all toasters, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers and...wait for it...vibrators?
She will be voted out in a second, once the vibrator tax hits SF. They will bootleg them in from Oakland.
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Agreed. There is no perfect definition. Robots are easy because they vaguely look like (parts of) people, but any form of automation could fall into this category. The outrage/fear appears to center more on the obsolescence of skilled jobs that used to pay family-supporting wages, which may be permanently shrinking the middle class.
So, what's fair to offset this trend? Razor-thin margin companies such as food distributors can lower their costs through automation to stay competitive, but they're still not v
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Robots are easy because they vaguely look like (parts of) people
You're thinking of androids. Robot is a far broader term. Or will you deny the existance of Kiva robots [engineering.com]
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Though I'm still unclear as to what companies you're referring to. Minimum wage often means service industry here, so what...is every McDonald's going to leave the city?
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Robotic Republicans will revolt and overthrow humanity.
Why would they need to build robots for that? Human republicans are sufficiently revolting for any purpose.