Bill Gates wants a robot tax to offset job loss due to automation

Zooey wrote:

I saw this, and it got me thinking about the other proposal (being tested in Finland or Denmark) if the universal basic income. Automation is going to create a big issue. A big unavoidable issue.

And I got to wondering if we really have advanced to the point where there is enough wealth and production in our society that with a different taxation/wealth distribution mechanism, where work will be increasingly “optional” rather than a ball and chain. The next 100 years are going to be the biggest revolution yet, I suppose.

We were there long ago. Keynes thought, back in the 1930s, we’d already be at 15-hour work-weeks by now. The only reason we aren’t is because we work to make a few people incredibly rich. Most of our day is spent doing that, unless we work in the public sector. In most jobs, workers produce enough to earn their day’s wages in their first few hours. All the rest goes toward executive overhead, profits, etc.

The math — for well over a century — has shown that if profit weren’t in the picture, and if we had at least close to egalitarian distribution of wages and access, everyone could live comfortably in the “middle class” range.

And, of course, if we could just break free of the fiction of capitalism, and substitute another, better (democratic, egalitarian) one, none of this would be a problem in any way, shape or form.

Money, especially, is a destructive fiction, and we’ve been brainwashed to believe that it must come from sales of things we produce. But why? Why not completely divorce, detach, sever the pool of funding from those sales? Why not invent a publicly owned and held pool of funding that we all have access to, instead of just the big banks, who then decide how to distribute it?

Sever all ties between sales revenues and our wages, taxes, funding, etc. etc. and we no longer have issues of debt, deficits, poverty, homelessness, hunger or scarcity.

It’s time to think waaaay outside the box — before it’s too late.

waterfield wrote:

Zooey wrote:

I saw this, and it got me thinking about the other proposal (being tested in Finland or Denmark) if the universal basic income. Automation is going to create a big issue. A big unavoidable issue.

And I got to wondering if we really have advanced to the point where there is enough wealth and production in our society that with a different taxation/wealth distribution mechanism, where work will be increasingly “optional” rather than a ball and chain. The next 100 years are going to be the biggest revolution yet, I suppose.

My wife has been saying the same thing for a long time. It seems inevitable that with the increase in population and automation, etc. there simply will not be enough work for everyone in the future. And so it will by necessity become optional.

Another driver going against the number of jobs, beyond automation: the environment. In reality, because capitalism is driven by the need to Grow or Die, to produce more and more shit we don’t need at all and the planet can’t sustain, we’re going to have to cut waaaay back on what we produce . . . . or humans and the vast majority of Nature won’t survive.

We’ve already lost more than half of our wildlife just in the last forty years, most of that due to pollution and the destruction of natural habitat. It’s simply not sustainable to keep growing, which boils down to (under capitalism) more and more production, and more and more consumption.

We need to toss “exchange-value” and go back to “use-value.” Produce what we need and no more, and do the vast majority of that locally.

Hell, we trash more than half the food we grow/produce, etc. etc. Any walk through a grocery store is really a walk through our own future gravesite. Most of that food is trashed — and this, while millions go hungry.

It’s obscene, really.