San Francisco politician want to tax "robots"

[josecamoessilva]

Man, if only those buggy whip manufacturers had politicians like this, few of those newfangled Otto-mobiles (because they use the Otto thermal cycle) would be around on the streets.

http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-considers-robot-tax-jane-kim-2017-4

From the article:

"Supervisor Jane Kim is exploring a tax on robots as one solution to offset the economic devastation a robot-powered workforce might bring. Companies that use robots to perform tasks previously done by humans would pay the city. Those public funds might be used to help retrain workers who lose their jobs to robots or to finance a basic income initiative."

 

For context: The city of San Francisco, pop. 800,000, has an annual budget of... drumroll, please... nine BILLION dollars. (And, despite being my favorite place in the world, as city amenities go, it's a dump.)

I especially like that the order screens at the local McDonald's are "robots." Like the T-800, but for minimum wage jobs.


Edited to add context: Portugal, a country with around 9 million people, has a total government budget equal to the city of San Francisco (again, pop 800,000), at 9 billion dollars (I converted from euro, yes). I want to be very clear that the $9B are not for the "Bay Area," just the city of San Francisco. With its potholes and garbage and trees dying and intermittent policing and infrastructure falling apart.

[MarkS]

I find it sadly funny that their own minimum wage hikes spurred on the need for automation to replace workers, then they want to tax the businesses for the foolishness of the government. I think passing economics 101 should be a requirement when running for office.

[sleemanj]

It is not in it's essence a terrible idea.

Let us assume for a moment that massive automation on an unprecedented scale which will see large swathes of jobs be lost is indeed around the corner, you might debate it but let's for now assume the worst case happens.

The reason for it is that companies will reduce their wage burden and increase their productivity and increase their profits for their shareholders, and this will be at the severe detriment of employed masses.

Coming up with a way in which to offset that problem, which is directly attributable to companies "getting robots to do humans jobs" (wherein robot is just a short-hand for "a machine that does a job otherwise a human would have" and includes things like self-service kiosks), is a good idea.

If nothing is prepared for, or done, and again we assume the worst case, we have a dire social and economic problem with massive unemployment, a further rise in the wealth of a small minority at the expense of the rest of us.

[sokoloff]

Do you have a refrigerator? Those put "ice men" out of work.
Do you have a car? What about the farriers and buggy whip makers?
Do you have a phone? Think about how that crushed the telegraph workers?
Is it touchtone? What about the telephone operators' jobs?
Do you have a digital camera? What about all the poor film developers?
Do you send email? What about the postal workers?
Do you ride automatic elevators? What about the elevator operators?
Do you use RFID toll tags, like e-z pass? Unemployed toll takers
What about golf carts? Those curtailed caddying as a career choice
Copy machines caused the folks who make carbon paper to lose their jobs
Excel means that a lot of assistants, accountants, and bean counter helpers are out of work.
MS Word and Outlook mean a lot of people can do a white collar job without an administrative assistant.
Self-serve gas pumps mean fewer attendants (in 48 of the states)

It seems a little odd to focus on only "new" robot applications while using the other conveniences/advancements that also killed jobs.

[MarkS]

...Snip...

I'm a taxi driver, electronics is only a hobby. I don't plan on doing this much longer and that's for the best. Within 10 years, taxicabs will have gone the way of so many industries past. Uber, Lyft and the like are the future. Within 20 years, driving will no longer be a profession due to driverless vehicles. Time Marches on and progress is progress. Fighting it is nothing more than applying a bandaid to a fatal wound.

[hamster_nz]

Assume that machine learning, self-driving trucks, delivery drones, voice recognition and so on actually come to fruition, and a large proportion of existing jobs get automated.

If/when that happens what will everybody do to earn a living? How do you distribute the fruits of endless automated production to enough people to have a functioning economy? What is the point of being able to produce endless widgets if only a small proportion have any wealth to buy them?

I've got no answer. We did this in manufacturing with the industrial revolution, and then industrial automation in the 80s & 90s but I don't have confidence that the economy can keep being restructured over and over again, each time giving a reasonable chance of paid employment for all.

Or if it does, imagine how fragile and brittle it would be to failure of core infrastructure - for example, should a few GPS satellites suddenly go offline how would anything get done?

(there enough useless ranting from me)

[ConKbot]

So if a McDonald's kiosk is a robot, what about a kiosk at a gas station/convenience store that never employed people to push buttons on a screen and has always let you push the buttons yourself? Do they pay?

[sleemanj]

It seems a little odd to focus on only "new" robot applications while using the other conveniences/advancements that also killed jobs.

Posted before, will post again

[wraper]

USA is not nearly the most cost effective place for manufacturing in the first place. Nice idea how to drive out manufacturing that was left.

[CJay]

Maybe instead of planning more taxes it'd be a good idea to persuade corporations and those individuals who can afford to employ tax 'mitigation' specialists and avoidance schemes to pay what the laws intended instead of what they can be twisted to say is legal?

I'd love to pay less tax but can't afford to buy into the schemes which could make it possible as I don't earn enough to make it worth my while.

[Kuro]

Posted before, will post again

Thanks! I learned nothing new, but this is the most concise best explanation of the huge problem heading for us in the next decade I have seen yet.

Still, people won't learn even if it gets explained to them in a simple manner like this. Just look at global warming. It's easier in the short term to stick your head in the sand and ignore it.

It reminded me of an interview with a local neoliberal politician who was asked what to do about unemployment, still quite high here. He said the best option was to cut all unemployment benefits - if people got hungry, they'd be willing to work. It shows the dogma that these people live by: if you're unemployed, it must be your own fault. There is no way you could be unemployed otherwise. Which is rubbish, even easy to prove so, but these people don't listen to evidence, but rather 'alternative facts'.

And even smart people (like EEVblog engineers  ) fall into this trap. Just look at this thread. What I find most amusing however is that the people who claim there will be new kinds of jobs anyway use the argument one should not resist change, because change is good in the long run. But when someone suggests changing society for more fair distribution of wealth or more specifically here tax robots, these very change lovers sing another tune. I always wonder if they ever notice the contradiction themselves...

[wraper]

It reminded me of an interview with a local neoliberal politician who was asked what to do about unemployment, still quite high here. He said the best option was to cut all unemployment benefits - if people got hungry, they'd be willing to work. It shows the dogma that these people live by: if you're unemployed, it must be your own fault. There is no way you could be unemployed otherwise. Which is rubbish, even easy to prove so, but these people don't listen to evidence, but rather 'alternative facts'.

That certainly would work quiet well for UK. Not particularly short term unemployment benefits, but those paid to the people not doing anything other than sitting on their ass for years.

[tszaboo]

It is not in it's essence a terrible idea.

Yes, please. Every other country, please place tax on robots. For sure there will be one country, which doesn't, and that is where I'm going to move, along with all the industry. Every single car manufacturer, PCBA assembler, every industry, which produces anything will move there. You know, what will be the end result? More people will lose their job, educated people, the ones who are giving tasks to the robots.
Do it. Economic suicide.

[BrianHG]

It's not tax the robots, but tax the products and services which you may purchase or use which used robots to be made, not matter which country it was manufactured in.  In a different way, these are the taxes we pay on imported goods, except, an additional tax if such items were made by robots.  But, I see how this still wont work, and create nothing but a can of worms and with dirty politics, there will be those who will be profiting like mad no matter which way things go at the expense of the vast majority...

[Cyberdragon]

It's not tax the robots, but tax the products and services which you may purchase or use which used robots to be made, not matter which country it was manufactured in.  In a different way, these are the taxes we pay on imported goods, except, an additional tax if such items were made by robots.  But, I see how this still wont work, and create nothing but a can of worms and with dirty politics, there will be those who will be profiting like mad no matter which way things go at the expense of the vast majority...

Untill robots become self-aware and start taxing us humans for everything.

[wraper]

Untill robots become self-aware and start taxing us humans for everything.

or just milking

[T3sl4co1l]

And even smart people (like EEVblog engineers  )

FYI, there are very few professionals here, so one should not expect too much of this crowd...

That said, of the professionals I know, the observation is much the same.  Humans are humans, 90-10 rule applies no matter how you slice it. 

Tim

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

Kitchen robots as well? And 3d printers too? What about the roombas? And the one in my swimming pool?

[Zero999]

...Snip...

I'm a taxi driver, electronics is only a hobby. I don't plan on doing this much longer and that's for the best. Within 10 years, taxicabs will have gone the way of so many industries past. Uber, Lyft and the like are the future. Within 20 years, driving will no longer be a profession due to driverless vehicles. Time Marches on and progress is progress. Fighting it is nothing more than applying a bandaid to a fatal wound.

I'm sceptical about driverless cars. Today, most trains still have drivers and rail is a heck of a lot easier to automate, than road vehicles. When driverless trains come into widespread use, then there's a possibility the same will happen with road vehicles.

[station240]

Tesla are going to be pissed if this sort of tax gets off the ground.
https://electrek.co/2017/04/25/tesla-model-3-robot-production-line-pictures/

[T3sl4co1l]

I'm sceptical about driverless cars. Today, most trains still have drivers and rail is a heck of a lot easier to automate, than road vehicles. When driverless trains come into widespread use, then there's a possibility the same will happen with road vehicles.

It's an imaginary, i.e., legal, barrier.

Consider: there aren't as many trains on the road as there are cars.
The cost of developing driverless trains is high.
The cost of defending driverless trains in court is high.  (It's likely that a robust solution would succeed in court, but the inevitable fact is, it would be challenged, and that challenge would be very expensive.)
Presumably, one can conclude that the maintenance cost, of having minimal human labor onboard the vehicle, is lesser than the amortized sum of the above steps.  Therefore, they do not pursue it.

Trucking has a similar problem, with a greater challenge (roads are more complex, and the driver must cooperate with other human drivers), and as it is right now, they're pinching off the labor as tightly as they can.  A truck driver still has more to do than a train driver, but more and more, their activities are proscribed by the constraints of their employer, and the legal obligations around that (labor laws setting mandatory break, for instance).

A general purpose passenger car has somewhat less liability compared to those other applications: modern cars are quite safe, even when driven very poorly, so the medical and legal risk to the company making them is relatively small.  They would still be exposed to class-action lawsuits, but that would only be applicable once a large customer base exists.  The early experiments (where we're at now) present only internal risk, and early adopters (where we'll be, fairly soon), present only a moderate risk.

Once the consumer version is perfected, enterprise grade versions will be picked up by all the shipping companies.  It doesn't make any sense for them to stick their neck out, when larger vehicles, more valuable cargo, and more homogeneous fleets, are at stake.

What I'm curious to see play out is, how much of the roads will remain human-accessible in the next 50 years?  Once human drivers become the minority (and they absolutely will), they will become the marginalized, restricted, and ever-more-vocal group.  Will they be limited to certain open-access roads or highways?  Will driver qualifications tighten?  (Perhaps making US drivers more like Germany's.)  What will be the equilibrium fraction once self-driving cars reach saturation -- 50% human? 10%? 1%?  I'm also absolutely certain that human drivers will not go away completely; but they will be limited to enthusiasts, whether because they like it that way (as most car enthusiasts today), or because they want to keep doing it that way (traditionalists).

Tim

[Neilm]

Tesla are going to be pissed if this sort of tax gets off the ground.
https://electrek.co/2017/04/25/tesla-model-3-robot-production-line-pictures/

But humans have never mass produced the Tesla model 3 - so no jobs lost

[mtdoc]

This is an interesting topic for sure. The normal human tendency is to extrapolate from the present infinitely into the future and therefore thinking that recent technological trends will continue along this path of more and more automation and replacement of human jobs by robots is only natural for any technologically minded person who came of age in the late 20th or early 21st century.

Maybe it will come to pass and if so the question of what to do with all the redundant humans will arise. Some have proposed instituting a Universal Basic Income.  But work is "good for the soul".  I see enough depressed young to middle aged people living on disability payments due to job ending injuries to know that this kind of dystopian future is just as troubling to me as the Wall-E type of automation induced human dystopia:


BUT - believing that the trend of technological advancement of the last 100 years will continue unabated requires ignoring the lessons of longer time frame history and the fate of past technologically advanced civilizations.  It also requires one to believe in unabated easy availability of the necessary physical resources and the global financial and political stability needed to continue along the advanced technology path set in recent decades.  I personally find that unlikely and therefore put the likelihood of a very highly automated future at less than 50%.  I find it more likely that we'll either end up in a Blade-Runner type technological dystopia or a return to a World Made by Hand low technology future (preferable IMHO).

[helius]

For the factory of the future to be completely automated, it needs its own automated supply chain. So it needs to build a fleet of robots to go out into the world to bring back raw materials. Competing automated factories will do battle on the scorched, uninhabitable remains of the Earth over the last available tungsten and molybdenum.

[james_s]

I'm sceptical about driverless cars. Today, most trains still have drivers and rail is a heck of a lot easier to automate, than road vehicles. When driverless trains come into widespread use, then there's a possibility the same will happen with road vehicles.

Personally I think we are decades further from a true driverless car than a lot of people think. Sure the Google cars have logged thousands and thousands of miles, but those thousands of miles are around the same few extensively documented routes. Just wait until someone tries letting one of those cars out in the wild and using it up here in the Northwest where standing water, mud, snow, ice, wildlife and other obstacles cover the roads, obscure visual markings, severely limit traction, etc. After decades of very smart engineers working on the problem, computers still struggle to identify a simple spam email from a legitimate one, a task that most humans can accomplish with a glance. Will a self driving car be able to reliably detect the difference between an errant shopping bag blowing across the road and a boulder? Will it slam on the brakes in a full emergency stop and get me rear ended because it sees a balloon in the street? Will it drive me off a cliff because spilled paint on the road looks like a lane marker? If we get half an inch of snow will the cars all shut down and refuse to move?

That said, automation replacing jobs really could become a serious issue. In the past new technologies have displaced some workers but at the same time they created many new jobs in other fields. With the sort of automation that is appearing now we could have jobs automated on a scale unlike anything ever before, and the jobs they replace are gone. Buggy whip makers could go on to make parts or accessories for automobiles, the technology is similar, the demand was even greater, but the sort of automation we're seeing now is created by a *far* smaller team of *far* more specialized workers than those it replaces. People are going to have to have a way to contribute to society and support themselves, and if we're going to automate everything IMO it should give us all more leisure time while making society as a whole more productive. Unfortunately what it actually tends to do is make a small number of wealthy people more wealthy while leaving the rest struggling and working harder than before just to stay afloat. If the number of people in that position gets big enough, society will collapse under its own weight.