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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
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(Score: 1) by moondoctor on Monday February 20 2017, @03:38AM
>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
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
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.