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Comment by okasaki | Hacker News Reader

> The significant investment in robotics showcases Amazon’s commitment to innovation in its supply chain and highlights the company’s belief in the synergistic potential of human-robot collaboration. Despite the massive scale of automation, Amazon emphasizes that deploying robots has led to the creation of new skilled job categories at the company, reflecting a broader industry trend toward the integration of advanced technologies with human workforces.

An article about robots that's written by a robot. It's robots all the way down.

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> has led to the creation of new skilled job categories at the company.

"While systematically removing the unskilled job categories at the company"

The robot missed out that sentence for some reason.

Well given the complaints about work conditions it would be good if humans were given less dangerous jobs

Not saying whether it’s good or bad, just the obvious bit left out.

Does really show that UBI discussion needs to be had sooner rather than later …

I'm coming to think that the wages that would have been paid to people who robots have replaced should now go into a sovereign fund to help fund UBI.

Haha that is funny.

Who will inform the turtles they are no longer needed?

Trust me, they'll know.

Don't forget all the robots reading it.

It seems the end goal of the advertising industry -- robots doing, robots writing, robots reading.

Like cockroaches and twinkies, one of the few things to survive nuclear war.

But will robots survive a nuclear war's EMP?

Military drones have to be covered in a Farraday cage layer to prevent jamming, so that would double as nuclear EMP protection. Finding a place to charge afterwards might be tricky though...

Have you read Accelerando by Charlie stross? He talks about a Vile Offspring that's basically what you said!

Maybe robots should pay taxes like humans since they are taking the jobs and the tax base that goes along with them.

Or you could tax the companies on revenue, the way employees are.

Sure, if you enjoy higher prices or lower wages

That’s too hard to do. What is “a robot” and “a job?” Replacing workers is easy enough to calculate that with, but what if I start a brand new factory that only ever used robots? The solution is wealth tax and UBI.

Get rid of regular income tax, then do a progressive wealth tax, which is enough to pay for a progressive UBI. This way, it’s no problem if you lay off all your workers to replace them with robots. In fact that’s great! Because now these people have a UBI, which frees them up to go find (or make) other work. Meanwhile the factory owner’s taxes should be going up, since his wealth is going up since he doesn’t have to pay all the workers, unless he’s still spending that money to further invest in things, which is also great.

The biggest problem really is people just hoarding wealth. If they are spending or investing it, then that’s not a problem.

Very few people hoard wealth. You imagine wealthy people like Scrooge McDuck with a room full of gold coins. It's almost always invested in stocks which helps companies grow or in bonds which helps finance public works.

Pretty sure a diverse portfolio will feature gold. It might not be in gold coins in the owners basement though.

Investing in stocks where most companies are doing their best to suppress worker compensation or out-right replace them with robots doesn't feel like it's doing much to help the average person either.

Public investment is on a downward trend since 2008 when governments had to save the bankers. What government spending there still is often has to filter through private service companies that are given government contracts. This usually results in good dividends and bad service.

Many people on UBI would be content enough to not search for more work.

So? UBI isn’t about making sure people aren’t lazy. It’s about making sure no one slips between the cracks, and can at least afford the basics.

Good, because the whole point of taking automation to its logical conclusion is that there isn't more work for them.

You need to start with no/little increase in taxes from corporations and see how that works. Previously unthought of loopholes will keep the status quo of low corporate tax payments.

> The biggest problem really is people just hoarding wealth

That is a pretty substantial problem and doesn’t seem close to the biggest one.

Written by a robot that was written by Amazon and runs in AWS. Vertical integration indeed!

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