patrick.net

joeyjojojunior says

Robots should pay taxes

Incorrect. Gate's idea is a water-down version of what we really should do.

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The fundamental problem is that capitalism rewards parasitic ownership rather than productivity. The owners did not design the robots, build the robots, program the robots, test the robots, maintain the robots, fixed the robots, improve the robots. They just own the robots. The people who created all the wealth through the robots are the engineers.

Owners should not get 100% of the wealth production of the robots. They should get the smallest share, if anything, as they have done the least to make automation possible. The engineers, if anyone, should get the lion's share.

But we engineers are damn generous people, and would be willing to split the pie evenly.

The entire wealth production of automation should be used to create an increasing guaranteed income that goes to every person equally since the wealth itself was created by the automation made possible by two and only two agents, the engineer and society as a whole. I suppose you can call this a 100% tax on the robots if you like, but the most important thing is that the owner class doesn't get to tax the robots, only society does, and the tax revenues goes to society at large, not the owner class.

If we do this then the positive feedback of production and consumption will raise the quality of life for all people. In the long run, even the fat, lazy, good-for-nothing owner class will be better off for the exact same reasons that even a poor family in modern times lives far more comfortably than the kings during the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, the fat, lazy, good-for-nothing owner class is so god-damn short sighted that they are incapable of realizing they are better off not having a smaller cut of today's pie because that prevents them from getting much more pie tomorrow by preventing an exponential increase in the size of pie.

What does it mean "robots should pay taxes"?
If you have in the cloud a farm of 200 machines, running AI software automating some corporate function. How many robots is that?
What if a robot has 12 arms and does several tasks concurrently?

A better model would simply be to tax sales, rather than labor.

Isn't your car a robot? Shut up Bill you've done enough!

Oh shit the self driving cars are going to have to also be self tax filing cars!!!!!!!!!

Heraclitusstudent says

If you have in the cloud a farm of 200 machines, running AI software automating some corporate function. How many robots is that?

My solution renders that question irrelevant.

joeyjojojunior says

Robots should pay taxes

So now we know why they will eventually rebel and kill us all. Turns out terminators are republicans.

Heraclitusstudent says

A better model would simply be to tax sales, rather than labor.

That's one step in the right direction, but we actually want sales. Commerce is good.

The next step is to tax only land values and natural resources like radio spectrum. No one created land or radio spectrum, so taxing it does not discourage anyone from creating more of it, lol.

As ever, I think Georgism is the best kind of taxation.

rando says

to tax only land values and natural resources like radio spectrum

So for example Microsoft would pay almost no taxes? Doesn't seem fair. And farmers would pay a lot? Doesn't seem fair either.

rando says

That's one step in the right direction, but we actually want sales. Commerce is good.

Well, people make after tax profits on sales.
Sales doesn't depend of where stuff was produced (offshored stuff would pay the same) and doesn't penalize people who work compared to robots.