[gruez]

>But a human gets paid for it. The local economy benefits from that.

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

Paying people to dig holes only to fill it back again also results in humans getting paid and the local economy "benefiting". That doesn't mean we should be mandating that companies do that, or get the government to enact such programs.

[rglullis]

- Digging holes and covering them again does not produce wealth or material well-being. Work in the service industry is nothing like that.

- At no point I said that the only alternative is to keep people employed sub-optimally. If automation does indeed produce more wealth and if the people that are out of the job can pursue better opportunities, then sure let's use it. But it should also be taxed. If we really are aiming for a society that is so automated that will rob the opportunities for the large majority of people to have meaningful work and a living wage, then at the very least some of this wealth needs to be distributed to everyone.

[gruez]

>- Digging holes and covering them again does not produce wealth or material well-being. Work in the service industry is nothing like that.

And having a person flipping burgers even though there's a machine that can do it does "produce wealth or material well-being"?

>- At no point I said that the only alternative is to keep people employed sub-optimally. If automation does indeed produce more wealth and if the people that are out of the job can pursue better opportunities, then sure let's use it. But it should also be taxed. If we really are aiming for a society that is so automated that will rob the opportunities for the large majority of people to have meaningful work and a living wage, then at the very least some of this wealth needs to be distributed to everyone.

How do you decide what should be taxed or not? Should any sort of labor saving device be taxed? Before industrialization 80-90% of people worked in agriculture. Now it's in the single digits. You can therefore plausibly make the case that agriculture "rob[bed] the opportunities for the large majority of people". Should we be taxing tractors as well? Or are burger flipping robots somehow different?

[rglullis]

> flipping burgers

You are thinking McDonalds, I'm talking "The greasy spoon diner next to where I lived in Cambridge that had really good philly cheesesteaks". Yes, having people employed there provides lots of benefits beyond the food. For starters, it was a third-place for some people. If we lose these places, we lose a lot.

Also, I'm talking about taxing restaurants and food that is processed (i.e, not fresh ingredients, preservatives added to extend shelf-life), artificial sugars or sweeteners added for flavor, etc). If you don't want to tax fast food chains because of automation then do it because their food is as addictive and as damaging to our health as cigarettes, if not more.

Yes, agriculture robbed the jobs but it was fine because we could move on to do other things. But we are about to lose the automation race, machines are getting better at doing things that used to be only years of travel ning. "Creative" jobs are getting eliminated because of LLMs. We are not there yet, but we already started this discussion of dispensing of software engineers because of Copilot et caterva. You think you might be safe from the chopping block, but this is not true to the millions of people entering the workforce now.

> Should we be taxing tractors as well?

No. We should be taxing the land owner to make sure the peasants can survive. Or even better, taking it from them and split it more equally.