None of these publications ever run with a solution to the problem. How about increased funding for employee retraining programs? I could see high ROI from that.
This is a good thing, and I agree with it. But, you are assuming an axiom that is breaking down:
There are enough jobs for everyone at a wage capable of supporting a family.
That is no longer true.
Watching the current kerfuffle in the Central Valley of California has been constructive. "We can't get people to do back breaking labor at $12 an hour now that they got rid of the illegal immigrants! WAH!" Well, at $12 an hour, which is below the official poverty level for a family of four, you are probably better to work at a fast food restaurant which is less work and not seasonal. So, nobody will work those farms.
Funny how shortage always seems to go hand in hand with below average pay. Funny how if the wage rises enough, there isn't any shortage anymore.
I guarantee that $20 an hour will find people to pick those fields.
> they shift the vitriol from foreigners who took our jobs to machines who took our jobs.
Your rhetoric is exactly the same as 100 years ago. I prescribe a trip to the Johnstown Heritage Center:
http://www.jaha.org/attractions/heritage-discovery-center/ http://www.jaha.org/attractions/heritage-discovery-center/hd...
The real problem is that the gains from automation have flowed to a very small number of people. If we don't figure out how to reverse that, we're going to be in very big trouble.
On the other hand, if we survive the worst effects, the world might come closer to a post-scarcity society.
Once we escape the notion that working is necessary to be a member of what is now called working-class society, we'll be better off. Those who want to live on little can live on little. Those who want more can learn a trade to get more. And those who have the most will support those who have nothing, because the alternative is worse.
Normally, it's easy to dismiss statements that are all-or-nothing propositions. Usually the person making the statement lacks imagination. Isn't there some alternative?
Unfortunately, there seems to be a >90% likelihood that the answer in this case is no: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
Once you accept that there is no choice other than giving people money to survive, the focus can shift to accomplishing that goal rather than dwelling on whether it might lead to economic collapse.
http://blog.samaltman.com/technology-and-wealth-inequality
> However, if we cannot find a new kind of work for billions of people, we’ll be faced with a new idle class. The obvious conclusion is that the government will just have to give these people money, and there’s been increasing talk about a “basic income”—i.e, any adult who wanted it could have, say, $15,000 a year.
> You can run the numbers in a way that sort of makes sense—if we did this for every adult in the US, it’d be about $3.5 trillion a year, or a little more than 20% of our GDP. However, we’d knock out a lot of existing entitlement spending, maybe 10% of GDP. And we’d probably phase it out for people making over a certain threshold, which could cut it substantially.
What makes you say so? Consumer surplus has been enormous, hasn't it?
Arguing against robotics is the same as arguing against computers and it is the same as arguing against assembly lines and it is the same as arguing against electricity.
You are arguing against the entire industrial revolution. On a website powered by the Internet and electricity to talk about technology.
So many people have some kind of unshakable faith that millions of new jobs are going to materialize once a huge percentage of the population has been made redundant by automation.
Can you name any, even in theory? What happens when a machine is better than a human in almost every conveivable occupation? Nobody has any good answers as to where these millions of jobs are going to materalize from.
This time is going to be different.
You can't demonize robots, they are non-living. If anyone is being demonized, it will the corporations who are moving from human to automated labor in order to cut costs. If 670,000 manufacturing jobs since 1990 have been shifted from humans to robots, it seems only fair to point that out.
> None of these publications ever run with a solution to the problem.
Probably because it's hard and involves ideas like guaranteed basic income and 'robot taxes' that are very unlikely to be popular in the US due to social attitudes. Perhaps such articles will lead to the change of those attitudes.
I'd say the real problem is a massive defect in what we imagine the goals of education should be. I read a novel once, I can't remember the name, but basically the galaxy-wide standard for being considered an adult us building your own spacesuit.
Step 1: tax all income equally (not flat rate, just not favoring particular forms), rather than having disfavorable taxation on labor (which basically amounts to a "robot tax subsidy".)
Step 2: if step 1 isn't enough, and you need to encourage hiring human labor more than eliminating the tax disincentive does, provide favorable tax treatment for labor income. (Which isn't exactly a robot tax, but has the same practical effect between robots and human labor.)
I do agree, taxes on labor income should be lower than capital gains, rather than higher as it is today. But the division is between those who own capital and those those who don't. The lower capital gains tax favors those who make money by investing, rather than producing. Laborers are producers, but so are manufacturing companies. A person who buys himself a robot or two and produces more with it is more productive, but he's still going to pay the labor tax rate, not the capital gains rate.
IMO, the answer to taxation is to tax capital gains highly (significantly higher than labor), and also have very strong progressive tax rates for both labor and capital gains. So, some laborer saving his money in an IRA will (eventually, when he withdraws it) pay taxes on the capital gains, but not that much because he probably didn't save that much anyway. Some laborer investing a few $k into some stock and doubling his money will pay higher taxes on that gain, but again not that much because it's still not that much money. A billionaire making a huge gain in stocks OTOH will pay a much higher tax rate on that gain, and a lot overall in taxes. A millionaire who owns a privately-held manufacturing company will pay a much higher rate than one of his laborer employees, however he won't pay as much as a millionaire who just lives off of investments (unless he sells that company).
Did any tasks have to be performed with the suit worn?
Was there a bonus for including a "head" in the suit, at least for the shorter term functions?
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For a generally less risk filled and short term exposure environment, a skin tight pressure suit with a helmet might work out. I recall reading about such a suit in one short story, but I don't know if an actual engineer has commented on it. It could be useful as an emergency life support suit.
It would have to be a balancing act. My guess is "probably not", because mass-producing modified photos wasn't a big source of jobs done by humans in the past.
Manufacturing industries where you could show a direct "1 robot replaced these 200 humans" causal relationship would (hypothetically) be the ones to be taxed.
Many "Job Killers" include retraining programs. Eg, Nafta, and proposed Coal -> Green energy jobs. I think Obama proposed some others as well in 2010.
Two issues.
1) Some subset of people see these as 'handouts' and want 'their job'. Additionally, if you've been doing X for 20 years the pay is always going to be lower to jump to doing Y now.
2) Training can be crowded. Beyond a waiting list. If a town of 10k loses 500 factory jobs and they go to a training program to be an HVAC tech, the town will be unable to support all 500 new HVAC jobs.
The near term mitigation is stop taxing labor excessively making it more expensive to hire workers; preferential taxation of capital income and funding social programs by payroll tax (and, as in the case of health insurance, employer mandates, which amount to the same thing as payroll taxes on the employees of covered employers) rather than general revenue combine to form a strong disincentive to get work done with human labor when there are alternatives.
Whichever political party has the ear of working people disenfranchised in meaningful numbers from their jobs, will absolutely consider regulating robots every bit as much as they regulate immigrant workers. Protectionism is a trap every party has fallen into from time to time.