Corporations will just make everything more expensive relatively to the amount of extra income everyone is getting. Cause why wouldn’t they? They’ll probably blame labor shortages again too.
“At this stage, proposals on how to implement a robot tax in practice remain very nebulous,” she says. “Legislators are likely to deal with the complexity of defining what constitutes a ‘robot’ and how to tax it. The distinction between a machine and a robot or between a computer program and AI is still not clear.”
Considering that virtually all industries are going to become AI powered to one degree or another in the near future, perhaps it would be more straightforward to demand a proportion of shares of any publicly traded company, and some equivalent for the larger non publicly traded companies, and distribute dividends directly.
AI will be what we will make it to be. It doesn’t have to take all our jobs. We have to steer it into the right direction instead of accepting bad consequences that will come otherwise.
That’s a very big if, and I’d happily support, but this is a utopia. What means will we have to demand comfortable life without economic and political power? What is more realistic that inequality will keep growing, rich people will start getting brain implants, genetically modify their kids, and we won’t even be the same species anymore. Though that’s highly unlikely in our lifetime. The point is that we must steer the direction of AI development today if we want to have power tomorrow.
So it isn’t an automation issue, it’s a social policy issue, just like it wasn’t an industrialization issue when the Luddites made their mark on history. And likewise, the problem isn’t about what or how the AI is developed (except maybe we shouldn’t give it the capability to kill us), but what we do socially with the results. We’re already far more productive than we were 50 years ago, with little real improvement in our daily lives (yes, there have been some serious improvements with communication and technology). That’s a failing of worldwide political policies, as well.
If literally everything is automated, money itself is worthless and we should just automatically produce stuff for people. If most stuff is automated, UBI would work.
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