this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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How would that work in practice? You can say that a whole factory is effectively one single robot, or dozens. Is self checkout a robot, but in this case still employs somrone?
But why male models?
It wouldn't necessarily be as simple as an income tax but I'm sure we can figure it out. One idea off the top of my head is you could create a VAT that assumes a product is completely created by robots and then companies can deduct a workers salary from that tax. Not saying that's perfect, just one example off the top of my head.
Service industry is trickier, but you could come up with a minimum wage tax per machine for machines that directly interface with a consumer, so a self checkout robot would be treated like a minimum wage employee or something with the special factor being that the consumer directly interacts with it. The POS industry is already regulated so I think there's a natural place to target that tax on.
I don't think it would be simple or easy, but our tax system was designed around economic output of humans and didn't take robots into account so if we don't try to make changes to it we're giving an unfair advantage to robots and punishing humans for being human, which is not a good situation and I don't think it's sustainable into the future. Hard or not, it's a problem I think is critical to be solved for society to function as automation becomes more and more versatile and ubiquitous.
IMO it would be better to fund a UBI with some simpler tax on companies, don't think it's actually a good thing for them to end up making people do work that robots could be doing as a way to avoid taxes.
But the opposite is already true today. Companies can make robots do work that people can do as a way to avoid taxes. Adding a tax on robots simply levels the playing field.
What if there was a lightbulb changing robot that cost $30 and lasted ten years? But because they would have to pay taxes on it as if it was a minimum wage employee, its use cannot be justified and an existing employee has to still spend extra time changing lightbulbs. That seems broken to me. Work that doesn't need to exist shouldn't.
And what's the difference between a cashier, who operates a checkout line, and a self-checkout attendant, who operates multiple booths at once? The tax law would have to codify that. And any time you codify something like that, you get people designing to optimize for tax law instead of making the best machines possible.
There are supermarkets where you don't even check out. You bring the scanner with you and leave the store.
What about self service laundry mats? Those exist for ages. Do we need to tax them because they don't hire people?
I like the idea another user have that you just have normal corporate revenue tax and then if you hire people you get a tax break. But other than that you can't really tax "robots"