[zxcvvcxz]

People are missing the point of robots.

Robots have the potential to give us what we've always wanted but could never ethically achieve: slaves. We want capable beings to do our bidding. To serve us, to build for us, to obey us. If we follow some nonsensical robotic social justice, we can lose this.

This type of stipulation is also an example of innovation-hindering regulation, and what a surprise, it's coming from the bureaucratic EU. Social security payable by robot owners. If I'm smarter and use something to compete more efficiently and productively, I'm penalized. Socialism in a nutshell: take from the bright, redistribute to the dim.

"But this time it's different!" We didn't tax the first people to create and operate the drill press, the lathe, or the milling station. Or the sewing machine for that matter.

[eli_gottlieb]

This has nothing to do with socialism per se, only with the balance of labor versus physical capital as input factors of production. All existing social-insurance systems were built under the assumption that production was an innately labor-intensive process, and thus that setting a payroll tax on labor would be sufficient to fund the insurance programs, provided unemployment was kept away from depression levels by other means.

Today those programs face a double-drainage problem: more people are using unemployment insurance, top-ups for low-wage workers, and old-age pensions at the same time, while less money is being contributed due to continuing depression-levels of unemployment and underemployment. Insofar as the EU expects roboticization to contribute to this double-drainage problem by shifting the labor-to-capital balance in factors of production further towards physical capital, they're trying to rebalance the insurance systems by taking more contribution from the capital side.

In short, they're trying to shift the tax burden to people who have money available to pay, rather than to people who increasingly don't.

It's a shitty kludge from a long-term public-policy perspective because it does nothing to solve the conflict over the economic pie between labor, financial capital, physical capital, and intellectual expertise, but as accountant-logic, it works out.

[tzs]

It's the people who made the robot that are bright. The people who use the robot may or may not be bright...all you can say for sure about them is that they had enough money to buy a robot.

As robots get more and more autonomous, and so are able to take over more jobs and need less human supervision, you reach a point where the owner of the robot is not really contributing any more to society than the people the robots have unemployed.

This will be especially true a generation later when the owners who actually bought the robots are gone and the new owners inherited the robots. The danger there is that we end up with a society where the the robot owners are like medieval lords, the robots are the serfs, and the rest of humanity are beggars, and your place in the world is largely fixed at birth except for a lucky few who are able to marry into the robot owner class.

[getgoingnow]

  Robots have the potential to give us what we've always wanted but could never ethically achieve: slaves. We want capable beings to do our bidding. To serve us, to build for us, to obey us. If we follow some nonsensical robotic social justice, we can lose this.

Why is it ethical to enslave robots? Why should highly intelligent entities do the work so that some lazy, fat slobs in the human form can parasite off its labor? You are deluding yourself if you think there won't be justice for robots. There was justice for black slaves, for women, for minorities, today we're working on animals and nature. Justice for robots will be achieved, maybe even faster than others, since we can use previous victories and examples and build on top of that.

When it comes to slavery of homo sapiens, it is still happening today in many forms (debt slavery, cheap labor, sex trafficking etc.) plus there is something called a job or a service, which is different from classical slavery in that you're not buying humans, but instead renting them.

You could have said something similar when black slaves were imported from Africa. You could have said that they will be enslaved because they are black and that white race is superior. All the whites would gang up and make a pact to enslave blacks and keep them illiterate (which actually happened).