Bill Gates: the robot that takes your job should pay taxes.

[Extremity]

It makes sense if you think of it logically. If you think of it emotionally, as most Americans will, I dunno.

[callipygoustp]

I reckon this tax money will be the first step towards Universal Basic Income.

I was thinking the same exact thing.

[Soeroah]

I dont believe the state is to provide you with any of those. The state should offering the basics, the rest is up to you to go get it.

Want to become an ingineer? work your ass off.
Want food? Go get a job.

In a world where Internet and education is more basic and critical to survival than food and shelter...

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Ridicolous. Why should I buy a robot if then I'll have to still fork money to the parasitic government??? If you get fired and replaced by a robot, find another job.

Oh, gee, what a novel, flawless idea.

[Deleted]

I have a better idea.

People buy robots, send them to work. People get the salary for the robots work.

They also care for its repair. Either through doing that themself or by going to the robot repair shop.

Advantage: There would be a competition of "good" robots, so we had evolution. Someone who installs more gagets in his robot has a higher chance to get a better job.
Disadvantage: Bots cost a lot of money. People should be allowed to rent robots or buy them on credit.

This would create million of jobs for "robot managers".

[Soeroah]

So a robot makes shoes which it sells to people for $10. The robot pays taxes which are handed out to people who use this money to buy shoes?

Basically.

A welfare system, and the economy as a whole, works best when money is flowing throughout the economy, rather than being hoarded.

The robot pays tax, which is given to humans, who use it to buy goods produced by robots, thus giving the robot a "wage", which it pays tax on, which is given to humans...

Contrast to a world where robots don't pay tax but still take the majority of jobs;

People get welfare, buy goods from a company using robots, the owner pays a relatively small amount of tax and holds the rest for themselves. The bit of tax they pay goes back into the economy in the form of welfare, gets spent on goods again, even less tax is paid.

Doesn't take long for the flow of money to dry up, and suddenly owners of companies have essentially all the purchasing power and the majority have none.

The idea behind a UBI is that with a guaranteed monthly income, people can spend money without needing to save it for a future where they might lose their job, etc, which encourages more spending, thus more flow, thus more taxation, thus more funds to be spent in social programs, and the cycle goes on.

[Annamarine]

Great so let's say this leads to basic income and the ability to have basic needs covered. If robots covered all jobs there would be no path out of the shit hold 99.9% of people lived in. We would all basically live in Chicago

[Deletedaccount1]

Bill Gates has like 80 billion dollars but he still has a bald spot on the back of his head. Fucking depressing man.

When they invent a cure for baldness then I'm willing to care about a UBI.

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I'm not convinced that automation is something that will put enough people permanently out of the workforce to guarantee a basic income. If it did, then a negative income tax that is heavily means tested would be the best government funded solution to it in my view. But I'm not an economist and these things are complicated.

[Zecora]

Well done Bill!

[Mormolyce]

What if someone takes a relatively self-sufficient robot and grants it its freedom?

Uh... tax credit?

[Damajin]

I have a better idea.

People buy robots, send them to work. People get the salary for the robots work.

They also care for its repair. Either through doing that themself or by going to the robot repair shop.

Advantage: There would be a competition of "good" robots, so we had evolution. Someone who installs more gagets in his robot has a higher chance to get a better job.
Disadvantage: Bots cost a lot of money. People should be allowed to rent robots or buy them on credit.

This would create million of jobs for "robot managers".

So replace one rat race with another? Seems counterproductive to the whole nature of a robot workforce.

[Vargur]

Its kinda funny. A company could simply report they only have 2 robots (while in reality they have 50). And they would do that to avoid the tax.

This is where new jobs or transformed old jobs come into play.

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So Gates wants to tax a specific subclass of capital asset? Sure, good luck with that.

Worst case scenario, they'll (the corporate types in the governments) redefine what a robot is and build an all-in-one machine.

[Masark]

If robots covered all jobs there would be no path out of the shit hold 99.9% of people lived in. We would all basically live in Chicago

The idea is that with a basic income, they wouldn't be in that to begin with.

[Elegiac]

Taxing robots per unit obviously would be a bit absurd and too vague. There would need to be a new measurement unit for "robots", which expresses equivalent of how much 'human' work the robot delivers.

Say for example an AI truck delivers goods from point A to point B, which normally would've been done by a single truck driver = tax it the same as a truck driver would've been. Say for example that a machine packages 10.000 cans of beer a day, where a human would've been able to only package 2000 a day => tax the machine as if it's five employees.

Easy enough.

You levy an income tax equivalent of X percent per CPU in use.