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]

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.