FINALLY!!!

[peristaltor]

From the NYT, some sanity regarding the completely screwed-up tax laws that are contributing to our growing un- and underemployment problem.

We may not want to tax innovation, but there is no reason to subsidize investments that are designed merely to take away jobs. At the very least, a tax on robots would force businesses to think harder about when and where to deploy them.

This advance of technology into the work-place need not be relegated solely to the robots, as the article notes. Simply define "robot" more generally as a piece of technology that makes a job easier to do and you find that this has been a problem for decades, if not centuries. I may get deep into the weeds of this problem… later.

Comments

[peristaltor]

I sounds like the car manufacturer created the need for the special wrench in order to make a bit of cash selling special wrenches. I doubt this tax would apply to such products.

It might, however, apply to the owner of the garage who buys a gizmo that can do the job your mechanic used to do, just so the owner doesn't have to pay your mechanic a wage.

[garote]

So what about the guy who opens a new garage across the street, who never had to hire the mechanic in the first place? Should he pay the tax/fine as well?

[peristaltor]

I guess it depends. Did he have to hire a mechanic, or did he open an automated garage with robotic widgets doing the work?

As to "tax/fine," let's remember that we are dealing with decades of tax law that has favored tech over human hiring, so much so that we are now in the midst of an economic "boom" with millions un- and underemployed and completely unable to buy the products cranked out by the automatons that goop them together.

[garote]

He opened an automated garage. Robotic widgets are doing the work.

[peristaltor]

So, the owner essentially has slaves, mechanical ones, that he pays only in power and maintenance, slaves that displace human workers paid living wages, workers forced to find… what form of sustenance??? What part of that scenario isn't dystopian?

Heck, Vonnegut wrote a whole book about just this. It wasn't my fave of his, but Player Piano is kinda prescient.

Again, I encourage you to read the linked NYT article. The tax benefits alone to mechanical slave purchases are pretty overwhelming.

[garote]

The tax benefits are indeed overwhelming, as they should be, because a business that takes up the valuable time of another human in performing some kind of labor should be paying a fair amount towards the care and feeding of that human.

The scenario I am describing is essentially what has happened countless times all over the world and is generally considered a cornerstone of modern civilization: Automation using tools.

Crank it back a couple dozen generations, to a hundred peasants threshing wheat and sowing seeds by hand. Drop a modern tractor in front of them, with a couple of handy attachments. Five of them will do the work that took all season in a couple of days. The other 95 will kick back and do nothing. Praise be.

What's different currently about this cycle of innovation that is actually upsetting people? Nothing. It's not the technology that's the problem. The technology is a red herring. The problem is access to capital. It's all being sucked up by a collection of incredibly large, incredibly horizontally or vertically integrated corporations and being redistributed to the very rich, and to a far lesser degree the middle class.

I get the impression that most modern middle-class people are convinced that the solution to this problem is a greatly expanded welfare state. I.e. your solution: Make the government tax the fuck out of the products of these large corporations.

I think the better solution is more direct. Put the teeth back into the useless flapping gums of the antitrust laws, and tear these corporations up into pieces. ESPECIALLY those in the god damn banking industry.

[peristaltor]

Drop a modern tractor in front of them, with a couple of handy attachments. Five of them will do the work that took all season in a couple of days. The other 95 will kick back and do nothing. Praise be.

What's different currently about this cycle of innovation that is actually upsetting people? Nothing.

Okay, not "nothing." Some thoughts. "Kick back and do nothing?" Yeah, but idleness is not something that feeds either the mouth or the soul.

Your example is, in fact, exactly what happened when the tractor was introduced to agriculture in the early part of the last century. Sharecroppers who had until then been living on the land (because, of course, someone's commute was a walk), caring for the horses or oxen that pulled the plow, and driving that plow as straight as they could, were suddenly evicted. The Grapes of Wrath and real-life Tom Jodes were born of this upheaval.

I did a bit of research into the invention of the stocking frame, the machine that knitted stockings. The inventor, William Lee, appealed to Queen Elizabeth for a patent. She denied it, on the grounds that it would cause upheaval in the cottage industry that then knitted the stockings by hand in the off-harvest times of the year. He improved the loom, allowing it to make better stockings, and appealed to James IV, Elizabeth's successor: same message. No patent. Too disruptive.

With every piece of tech, there are people who own it, people who use it, and people who are affected by it without either owning or using it. The linked article here is raising questions (not perfectly, I fully admit) about how the current laws favor only those who own the tech, not anyone else.

I think the better solution is more direct.

I fully agree; here, though, is a bit of a rub: ownership of patent and/or machines to do the work increases capital accumulation in exactly the people you wish to Better Solution More Directly, including, yes, those GD banksters.

[garote]

We should call it Better Direct Solution More, so we can refer to is as BDSM. :D

Interesting tale about the stocking frame. Do you think it was the correct decision? I get the impression that the women hanging out at home knitting stockings might have had a different opinion than the royalty -- if they'd been allowed by society at the time to make better use of themselves.

I was being a bit sarcastic about "kick back and do nothing". Back in the days of peasants, if the tractor had suddenly appeared, the lords would most likely kick the suddenly redundant peasants off their land. Roving bands of angry, hungry peasants would become a problem, and there would probably be a confrontation and a slaughter, since the Peasants are Revolting. But I don't think this hypothetical bungled deployment of the tractor is an argument against the tractor. It's an argument against the feudal system.

Also, when you say, "the current laws favor only those who own the tech, not anyone else," I don't think that's truthful. All the usual capitalist effects still apply. The people who use this still largely hypothetical robotic white-collar human replacing tech, even without owning it, still derive benefit from it the usual way: They get work done and don't have to spend money supporting a human for employment purposes. And the people who neither own or use the tech still derive benefit from it in the usual way: If the service is cheaper without a robot performing it, the price goes down.

Unless of course there's a big fat monopolistic electronics company sucking all the money out of the economy by fixing the price and using the difference to buy up any potential competitors.

As an aside, I learned recently that an acquaintance of mine - a software developer turned IT manager at my old stomping grounds inside Apple - recently let herself get poached back over from Google where she'd been for a few years, and now makes a yearly salary of $450,000. That's not including other stock and healthcare benefits, that's just the cash portion of her salary. Among other things I could say about that wage, I think it's proof that too few companies are making too much money, and need some real competition.

[peristaltor]

Just read this in a book I'm taking notes on, from Norbert Wiener, talking about the changes the embrace of his developments in tech would foist on the world:

Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor. It is perfectly clear that this will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which the present recession and even the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke.

(I emboldened.)

[garote]

Ahh good ol' Norbert. You know, I am just as qualified to speak on economic matters as he is. ;)

Let's augment the example of the mechanic, with another one.

Say I go to the store and buy a cellphone. I sign a few forms, pay a fee, and the person at the desk sets me up with a phone number. I walk out of the store and try to make a phone call.

Do I press the "operator" button, and then tell a switchboard operator something like "Bigelow 6372, please," and wait while a person moves a TRS connector from one place to another?

No. But that's what was required to make a phone call, anywhere from 40 to 100 years ago, depending on your location. That switching process is now done by a series of integrated circuits and many lines of computer code.

I would have a very hard time estimating the increase in the volume of phone calls made every year, over the last 100 years, due to population increase, system efficiency, phone proximity, and signal improvement. But I imagine that increase is absolutely staggering. Just in the last quarter century, we've gone from the norm being one phone per household, to one phone per person, and now we're chucking individual household appliances onto a decentralized iteration and extension of the phone system, called the internet. Over the evolution of this network, a lot of switchboard operators lost their jobs and had to find something else to do, but the number of switchboard operator jobs that were never created in the first place is many orders of magnitude larger.

Shall we tax the various American phone companies, for the missing ten quadrillion hours of phone operator wages we've racked up, by replacing them with silicon? Wait, that estimate is still too low, given how packet routing works on the internet now. The missing one hundred billion trillion hours of wages... Maybe that's closer. Maybe not.

I've already established my position: It makes sense to find some way to finance the re-training of displaced workers during an abrupt technology shift by taxing both the new players and the old, in a targeted fashion. It does not make sense to bleed money from new industries, into the government's hands, and then back out again to uninvolved persons, based on the fact that those industries can provide their product or service without hiring manual human laborers in the first place. That's basically a knife in the back of the proverbial golden goose.

[peristaltor]

"One ringee-dingee. *Snort*"

—Ernestine the Operator

I've been reading way too much on related topics lately. Yes, it's true; telecommunications is just one of the industries that has benefited from tech, just like sock making and agriculture (though that last one is highly debatable, given the finished product).

I think there's a middle ground between "innovation" and displacement. I put The I Word in scare quotes because often changes in tech touted loudly as "improvements", especially lately, are highly debatable, if not outright Not There.

Back to your phone example. Yes, electronic switching has saved many ankles and knees from skating injuries. But has the wholesale mining of smart phone user data bettered the lives of those tracked and monitored and analyzed, simply that their personal data can be used against them for advertising purposes?

That same can be said for all the internet-connected household appliances you cited. Sure, your home thermostat can adjust the temp for you, saving money; it is also noting which rooms in your house you spend most of your time in, when you are at home regularly, what kind of activity happens when you are home, etc. Your fridge can order more milk or sugary beverages; it can also short-circuit the user's desire to lose weight by dunning with subtle hints that he is low on that soda he's vowing to curb for a while. Shoshana Zuboff notes mattresses (!) that monitor activity by time. Seriously, what the flying fuck!?

A modest cost to buying gadgetry, especially for industry, might instill some Come-To-Jeebus moments in what has become rampant surveillance disguised as Commerce That Will Set You Free.

Anyway, I'm not arguing that tech is all good or bad. I'm arguing here that the pace of tech adoption might be the only concern needing to be addressed. Right now, fire employee = profit, while buy gadget = profit. There is no middle ground… unless you count the ground currently slept on in ever greater numbers by former employees.