Why not just regular taxes? If all profits and income is taxed at a sufficient level, the flow of money will still be mostly the same.

Just have to avoid designing/retaining loopholes for those who control the most resources.


If anything, freeing up human workers should mean more people can be politicians. And maybe we need to make sure there's a higher replacement rate and better rotation of people with political power.

Take the battle to the toasters and avenge their deaths?

The wonderful Iain M Banks has already imagined such a time.

We will be looked after by benevolent AI minds who will provide everything we desire. Work will be optional and we will life in a post-scarcity society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture

Hehehehehe that's right!!! The Labour party totally did that!!! Oh wait... no they didn't

Give robots the vote?

I remember back in the 70s it was seen as a positive thing, people working fewer hours which meant more leisure time and better health, in fact leisure centers were being built at that time as if in preparation and were featured in Tomorrows World as such.

For some reason that all stopped and so did the prospect of more leisure, people are now having to do two jobs to make ends meet and the jobs are mainly in the service industry where robots haven't yet taken over.

What will govt do?

It can't afford to keep everybody in money so like it or not companies will have to take their share and fork out, after all it's they who are the winners here.

Implode hopefully

I've often thought this with supermarket self scan. Are products cheaper or profits bigger?
There should be a form of tax just like a human has to pay.

State redistribution of goods.
Basically communism.

Yep. Automation was assumed would result in more leisure time because it would take less hours to do the same level of productivity. But they forgot this is a capitalist economy, so bosses kept the hours the same and got more productivity out of us, whilst not increasing our wages in line with productivity.

I remember seeing a graph once in regards to the US economy; worker productivity had gone up about 400% since the 70's, but wages had stayed the same in real terms.

Tax the robots, of course.

The trouble is you'd have to tax the manufacturer the full cost (profit included) of their product in order to allow the idle citizens to purchase it. What we really need, assuming no ones going to call a halt to this robot desecration of the workplace, is a profit free economy.

And increasingly the jobs of the comfortable many depend on there being enough people doing similar jobs, some people on considerably more money , and a few people on a lot more, paying for their services.

Corbyn still lives in the world of the 85 % scraping by earning factory wages, and the rest being those up or downstairs. A look around Islington however reveals that his constituents are working in cafes and restaurants, boutiques, dog grooming studios, nail bars, theatres, art galleries, and antique shops- that depend on someone else having excess money to spend on things that are unnecessary. If you tax those on middle incomes by the amount Corbyn proposes, you just end up with mass unemployment.

Russia tried that. What was made, or not made, didn't match any demand for it, and, as there was no incentive to do anything, most people didn't bother . Russia tried , and failed, to incentivise people by shooting them - but even that might not make sense with robots.

At what level - companies work on a margin that can be anything from 1-2% and 50%. So you are going to have a whole load of ex-companies employing ex-workers or not as the case maybe.


I think you will find it is 12%. However look at Agriculture - originally pretty much the whole country was employed in farming - it is now 2%.

Every phase of technological advance has resulted in more jobs - because nobody knows what jobs will be created by the new technology - so the job I do did not exist 50 years ago.

Not this phase as any new jobs would be able to be done by human like robots/androids.

not so sure about that........more and more people will just be employed to shuffle the money around by performing services

there'll be more coffee shops, more hairdressers.......would you really want a robot cutting your hair when the point of going to the hairdresser is to spend an hour being pampered and having a chat

I shuffle information from one place to another and charge people for doing it.......I don't really produce anything

the robots might produce goods but I think personal services will always be done by people........it's unlikely you'll go to a robot dentist or chuck money in a hat for a robot street entertainer or pay to see a robot theatre production of Macbeth..........very few of us will produce anything. We'll all be sending money around the circle in return for personal services

They will be able to do anything because in the end they could be made indiscriminable from humans.

True - just think of all the jobs that didn't exist in 1960 or 70 - from financial advisers, kitchen designers,or IT specialists, to dog walkers, nail technicians, and fashion designers. Or the expansion in the numbers of taxi drivers, vets, care workers, social workers, lecturers, estate agents, restaurant staff, or travel agents. Or there's the upgrading of typists and nurses and hairdressers. .

One of the problems is that much of that needs average incomes that are higher overall, and many need enough people with incomes well above the average, to pay for their services. The alternative is nothing happening. A good example is the theatre- when,for most shows, if there are not 300+ people paying £60-90 for a seat, there's not enough coming in for the other 700 in the audience to see a show, and there's a hundred actors, and theatre staff ,on the dole.

Edinburgh Festival, I was at a show tonight. 80% were other performers. It was crap.

Would the gap between rich and poor increase with such a glut of people providing the same basic services ?

The widening gap is an inherent aspect of capitalism when there are ineffective policies in place for wealth redistribution. It really comes down to capital being able to move around the world much more easily now, but taxation and people (unless you're wealthy, you can pretty much live anywhere if you plonk down enough investment money) being controlled at a local level.

Has anyone seen this yet, Robot Revolution on Sky?


http://news.sky.com/story/1544464/ro...-happening-now

"Robot Revolution: The Future Is Happening Now"

http://news.sky.com/story/1544884/ro...-take-your-job

"Robot Revolution: Will Machines Take Your Job?"

http://news.sky.com/story/1545155/ro...tehall-inquiry

"Robot Job Threat Focus Of Whitehall Inquiry"


Are we going to need a new economic model to pay for the mass unemployment that the robots are going to create soon?

My instincts are that there will be a Drone tragedy soon. First of many. And that this will slow things down a bit as legislation kicks in much harder from governments saying: What were we thinking? Amazon dropping a George Forman Grill on your head 5 seconds after you open the front door?

But I am fed up of hearing that your driverless car can kill you. This is impossible. *



* Except for those odd occasions when it catches fire 3 seconds after completing it's reverse manoeuvre into the garage which forms the ground floor of your town house.......

Perhaps to preserve jobs for the young manual workers would not have to work into their mid and late sixties when their bones and joints have been worn out?