[contingencies]

Automation tax sounds sketchy. How would that work? All computers have DRM and programming becomes illegal? Unregistered physical automation becomes banned? Man the toolmaker can no longer make tools? What use are a bunch of depersonalized hominids?

[bumby]

It’s been talked about for years, but my lay understanding is that tax is levied on automation that displaces human production. This circumvents the issue where we have a system based on income tax, but a lower ratio of income to production.

So if a factory used to employ 100 people, who were paid a salary, that salary was taxed generating income for societal benefit like roads and hospitals. But if automation comes in and produces the same with just 10 people, the money from income taxes for societal benefit is reduced by 90%. The net effect is that society may have less money for the collective benefit even as production gets more efficient. An automation tax would make up the difference.

It’s not altogether different than the “mileage” tax for electric vehicles to displace the gasoline taxes that fund roads. It’s a different tax scheme because the fundamental premise has changed (road use is proportional to gasoline consumption/tax needs are proportional to human salary). Taxes are systems of convention so we don’t need to pretend they must adhere to some immutable physical law.

To your question about how it could be implemented, I’m sure there’s lots of nuance. But to illustrate it off the top of my head, industries may have baseline rates of per-capita production and if they implement automation to exceed that substantially, that excess production would be taxed. So a craftsman woodworker who makes five items a week wouldn’t be affected, but a cabinet factory making 300 per capita items per week would.

[contingencies]

Thanks for clarifying. Concerns: (1) Looking backwards: "a factory used to". That's questionable, we should look forwards. (2) Proxying. "was taxed generating income for societal benefit". If the net outcome of a factory is to give people money, shouldn't we just skip the factory and give people money? Isn't that more efficient? (3) Suggestions around structure and limits. These will be abused. I'm a craftsman woodworker, but so are my family, we in aggregate produce more than the factory, but we're all under the threshold.

I'm not sold. Actually, I think there's more to it. There's been an historical association between people's job and their sense of identity and self worth. The value of work is not just about earning money, or the portion of that money that is transferred to social uses through taxation or otherwise. If you just implement UBI there'll be bored directionless people, drug use, criminality and social problems. What we need is recognition that (a) we don't need the people anymore (b) that's OK (c) different people may freely choose between social engagement and hibernating in a room with VR or going full artist hermit mode or becoming a triple PhD or being a psychonaut or whatever.

The oddball reality is we're sort of there already, it's just not evenly distributed. Ask an anthropologist or an economist or a technologist: what policies should governments put in place to support people and society in a transition to "nobody works or needs to work or engage with one another at all?" Turn them all in to GPS tracked phone zombies? Build sovereign wealth funds? Redefine collective identities in virtual spaces? Slowly introduce methods to reduce fertility? Reject technology and return to nature?

It seems to me that our ape minds are not well suited to the new reality. Most will seemingly choose to live a reactionary life of experiential consumption in a bubble of consensual hallucination crafted by technology that is controlled by others... and soon, controlled by endless generative AI. As a species we are enslaving ourselves to the perpetual feed through laziness.

In an era where similar popular experience increasingly lies at every corner of the globe: ask yourself - what kind of life do you want to lead? As technologists, we now arguably have greater ability to alter humanity's course than the politicians. We should think about how to use it.

[bumby]

>"a factory used to". That's questionable

1) The past gives context and so we shouldn't dismiss it. In this case, it provides insight into why the current tax structure is the way it is. If the underlying premise change (ie the nature of work changes) we should look to also changing the tax system. To me, that is looking forward, but using the context of the past to inform our judgement. Imagine if the past tax was based only on agrarian income because that formed the basis of the economy when the country was founded; I don’t think we’d want that same tax structure in a modern economy when the proportion of farmers is in single digits.

2) I think this ignores the overall system. The economic system isn't one dimensional. Society benefits from the factory, but the factory also benefits from society. They don't work in isolation, so a single end goal ("just skip the factory and give people money") is an over simplification of the system and its goals.

3) But you would all pay an income tax, so (in an ideal implementation) it balances out. No automation tax collection, but higher income tax collection. The inverse is true when it spills over the automation tax threshold: lower income tax on per capita production, but higher automation tax collection.

>I'm not sold. Actually, I think there's more to it.

Of course there is, and I've admitted there would be a lot of nuance. We should be careful that the nuance isn't gamed, but that doesn't mean the best alternative is the current system, or worse, an overly simple system like a flat tax that disregards nuance completely.

>There's been an historical association between people's job and their sense of identity

Yes. There's some benefit to this, but it can easily spill over into a toxic mindset. I don't want to live in a society where people's identity (and potentially moral self-worth) is at the whim of an employer. I think the job/identity coupling is a very Western mindset (probably rooted in a Puritan work ethic), but not a particularly healthy one. That's why we have issues with diseases/deaths of desperation like you allude to. I think the better solution is to decouple people's self-worth from their work, rather than ensure people keep working.

>The oddball reality is we're sort of there already I hear this a lot, but it reminds me of when I was in college (decades ago) and I had a professor (who was nearing retirement at the time) and he spoke about when he was in college he had to write an essay about how people would manage their lives when they no longer had any work to do because of all the efficiency gains that were just on the horizons.

>As a species we are enslaving ourselves to the perpetual feed through laziness.

I think this is the Aldous Huxley A Brave New World viewpoint (written in 1931) so I don't think it's anything new. FWIW I tend to agree.

[gosub100]

It would boil down to a profitability tax. As an exaggeration: a company with 7 people on the payroll that brings in $10m a year has to pay it. But a company that employs 700 and earns the same does not.

[contingencies]

I've lived in China and seen the results of "CCP says you have to employ X people". The result is a bunch of people sitting around doing nothing, earning low incomes, and feeling despondent: the so-called "iron rice bowl". The system will be gamed by the managers, the people will merely be pawns.

[gosub100]

That's a valid concern, but not an inevitability. I think if they don't want to pay the tax, they could move their business to a tax loophole state like Wyoming. But they shouldn't be allowed to siphon money out of a city without paying into the city. If doing business in CA gives them access to 30+ million potential customers, they can give CA a cut.

[maxglute]

The alternative is unemployed people sitting around, earning no income, feeling more despondent... and bored. AKA how to get radicalized and doing worse than nothing in todays info enviroment. Did you live in China pre 90s, i.e. when actual "iron rice bowl" positions existed, they were above median income state job with good benefits (relative to income at time), but was about 1/6th of 600m workforce. Closer to all the random gov jobs being created on tax payer dime.

[bumby]

Much more succinct description than mine :-)