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posted by on Sunday February 19 2017, @05:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the robots-are-not-covered-by-the-sixteenth-amendment dept.

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.

Recode, citing a McKinsey report, said that 50 percent of jobs performed by humans are vulnerable to robots, which could result in the loss of about $2.7 trillion in the U.S. alone.

"Exactly how you'd do it, measure it, you know, it's interesting for people to start talking about now," Gates said. "Some of it can come on the profits that are generated by the labor-saving efficiency there. Some of it can come directly in some type of robot tax. I don't think the robot companies are going to be outraged that there might be a tax. It's OK."

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2017/02/18/robots-that-steal-human-jobs-should-pay-taxes-gates-says.html

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by moondoctor on Sunday February 19 2017, @06:27PM

    by moondoctor (2963) on Sunday February 19 2017, @06:27PM (#469008)

    >"Exactly how you'd do it, measure it, you know, it's interesting for people to start talking about now," Gates said. "Some of it can come on the profits that are generated by the labor-saving efficiency there. Some of it can come directly in some type of robot tax. I don't think the robot companies are going to be outraged that there might be a tax. It's OK."

    The level of cluelessness/arrogance is amazing.

    'Start talking about' these issues? There are universal income schemes being trialled right now to see if that's an answer to this problem. It's just one possible answer to a question that was asked a long time ago. People that arrive at an obvious conclusion (robotz gonna take all the jobz) that has been widely discussed for decades, then claim it's a new thing are extremely irritating. Way more so when they are smack on the wrong side of the issue.

    He doesn't think the corporations will mind paying more tax? For real? That's one seriously disingenuous statement. All the increases in profit due to automation have gone directly upward, and fast. All the while the corps have bent over backwards to minimize any tax payments.

    To cap it all off, as people have said again and again, just excel on it's own has made a metric shit-ton of jobs disappear but he sat back and the wealth gap tore into the stratosphere while he's chiselling on his taxes and plenty rich as fuck like the rest of them. Please. The hypocrisy is pretty off the charts.

    There is a big, fundamental change that started a while back but is kicking into full swing and happening right now in global manufacturing and industry. The way things are going it looks like gigantic farms can be run be a handful of people within the next decade or two. Same with shipping ports, mines, it's wild. Once equipment maintenance and repair becomes automated the last of the menial job takeover should happen very quickly. Factories will be able to retool themselves.

    What happens then will be fascinating. Hopefully in a good way...

    At least it's getting talked about by him, I suppose.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 19 2017, @06:50PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 19 2017, @06:50PM (#469021)

    If you control the message you can partially shape the response.

    If he said corporations would be outraged, F-this, then I am sure they will be happy to pile on.

    But when everyone reads that taxing robot workers is OK, the expectation can be set that this is a normal and just thing to do. He is controlling that narrative by getting out there and stating this. He may not be the first, and he may not particularly be relevant to comment on the topic, but he has more weight in "computer stuff like robots" than a common celebrity -- or someone selling or buying robots would.

    Everyone would expect the sellers to not want to see profits lost from buyers not wanting to pay more taxes and so they purchase less robots or lease their use for less time or whatever.

    So what happens then is the Regular People Like Those That Might Lose Their Jobs that probably won't see a universally guaranteed income from whatever government is in power because someone has to pay for it unless they hand the robots out for free, they expect that if they had to pay taxes themselves before getting replaced by a robot that doesn't have to eat, at least the robots can be taxed in a means called something like "human right size adjustments".

    You certainly can't expect the people that still have jobs to want to pay additional taxes to fund the welfare. Not with how people have been trained to see that as for lazy worthless people unless it happens to themselves. You have to fund it via another means, or start a war to kill that problem off.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by mhajicek on Sunday February 19 2017, @09:06PM

      by mhajicek (51) on Sunday February 19 2017, @09:06PM (#469069)

      The biggest problem I see is how to quantify "worker equivalent units". Should a clothing manufacturing robot be compared to a human with a needle and thread, or with a basic sewing machine, or with an advanced sewing machine? And what skill level of worker? Also, if corporate profits were taxed appropriately then there wouldn't be any need for this.

      --
      The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
    • (Score: 1) by moondoctor on Monday February 20 2017, @03:38AM

      by moondoctor (2963) on Monday February 20 2017, @03:38AM (#469154)

      >unless they hand the robots out for free

      With the returns they will get from the robots, the up front cost is negligible in the not very long term. They will be more than free, they will make profits skyrocket.

      >You certainly can't expect the people that still have jobs to want to pay additional taxes to fund the welfare

      No shit. Don't tell me what I expect, particularly when it's made up.

      How on earth did you get there? We're talking about huge multinational corporations that will only require a (relative) handful of people to run in the near future. The point is that when jobs are taken away the profits go to fewer people and to balance society the company creating these massive profits should be taxed quite highly. Taxing workers in this environment would be asinine. (obvi)

      This is Bill Gates saying this shit, it's foregone conclusion that things have to change. The question is how...

      If higher corporate tax doesn't float your boat, got any other ideas? (for real, I'm not being facetious)

      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 20 2017, @04:28PM

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 20 2017, @04:28PM (#469301) Journal

        A basic, simple robot, with no sophisticated sensors or anything, can pay for itself within months. All the robot need do, is eliminate mistakes. Our machine operators used to load metal inserts into the molds before the plastic part was injected into the mold. Humans get tired, humans get bored, humans get distracted, and sometimes, humans just don't give a damn - so rather frequently, they would load an insert into the mold upside down, backward, or maybe not even on the pins where they belong. The mold closes on the metal insert, and CRASH! The mold is wrecked, it has to be taken out of the machine, and given to the tooling department for repairs. Tens of thousands of dollars in downtime, plus thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in repairs.

        Our robots all paid for themselves within six months, simply by eliminating those careless mistakes. The frequency of bent or broken pins has been cut by at least 90%. We have molds that only come out of the machine now for periodic maintenance. Most damage is caused by failure to lubricate sliding parts, or the failure of a sensing switch on the machine. It's a whole different world with the robots.

        All of that said - I still hate to see the workforce cut to make room for the robots. The primary reason we had such crappy machine operators is, the pay sucked, and reliable workers could find better paying jobs elsewhere. Increasing wages would have attracted better, more reliable workers. A semi-skilled laborer should get a starting wage at least 25% higher than minimum wage, and he should see some raises in pretty short order. Paying a starting wage of minimum wage, coupled with a "wage freeze" drove a lot of people out the door.

        • (Score: 1) by moondoctor on Monday February 20 2017, @05:36PM

          by moondoctor (2963) on Monday February 20 2017, @05:36PM (#469343)

          Bingo. And all those cost/benefit relationships are getting bigger at breakneck pace. The meat robots are just expensive and getting in the way at this point. Couple the throwaway mindset with modular design (i.e. unafraid to just replace entire assembly that has one small failure) and robots can be fixing themselves pretty soon. (That said, my heart does beat a little faster every time a tricky job runs on the big CNC as I pray it doesn't eat the material or itself. It doesn't even notice when it's snapped a tool and is ramming the head into the work.)

          As a fan of old school machinery (wrenching on carburetor cars, etc.) it's sad, but the potential benefit for society/progress as a species is phenomenal. It's all about how we manage the transition. It's not going so well so far for the lower segments of society.