As more and more manual jobs are going by the way side, how are folk supposed to support themselves and their families? A list of jobs (Example) that are or eventually will be absorbed by Robots: *Assembly Lines *Vehicles manufacture of all shapes and sizes *Butchery *Food service *Horticulture, Domestic and Industrial farming. *Manufacturing of any, metal plastic or composite products. *Mining industry, above and below ground. *Aviation. We need a "Robot-Tax" now!
The purpose of your robot tax is to slow down advancement in this area? Personally, I'd rather see additional tax on consumption (of all goods, including those produced by robots) with the money spent on retraining displaced workers for job industries of the future. You can't hold back the tide. Better off surfing with it.
Most transport will be robots too, haulage and passenger. Once robots are doing all the jobs there will be no need to work and no need to earn money, everything will be done for us, we can concentrate on the entertainment industry, making YouTube videos and stalking celebrities. Of course poorer nations will want what we have but with a robot army to defend our borders it won't be a very long war.
They'd support themselves by adapting to change, upskilling themsleves and realizing that many of the manual labor jobs may not be around much longer. Exactly what they did as we transitioned from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age. Plenty of jobs lost, plenty of jobs created.
Economic decisions are made at the margin. In order to encourage job growth we have to enhance productivity as a means to encouraging extra or additional consumption aka the means of satisfying our needs - not increasing the cost of consumption or raising barriers to it. Edit to add: it's worthwhile remembering that taxes on consumption harm producers, and that taxes on production harm consumers.
But what happens when robots and AI get better and put the upskilled workers out of a job as well? There are already bots working in the legal field. The parking ticket bot is one of the most famous ones (and it's recently been re-deployed to help process refugee applications), but there's another one that helps people represent themselves in court (and it's an Australian one too). It won't take long for them to start spreading to other areas like wills, divorces, industrial relations, workers comp, etc. There are loads of bots editing Wikipedia, even just for simple things like grammar and punctuation. Okay, that's "only" Wikipedia, but you used to need someone with a lot of skill and knowledge to be able to edit documents and it's not like those bots couldn't be adapted to other areas. Quite a lot of sports and financial commentary is already being written by bots. At some point, these AIs and (physical) robots are going to get really smart. We built machines in the Industrial Age because they produced physical stuff more reliably and uniformly than human workers did. Humans were freed up to spend their time thinking about important things. What happens when we build AIs and bots that can think better than humans can?
Nobody has all the answers, but I refuse to believe the answer is for us to sit on our ar$es and let robots do all the work under some BS universal income scheme. To me that is effectively quitting. Evolution ends and we become idiocracy and may as well just become extinct. We have to try and improve ourselves, our skills and our technology. If we are racing against the AI then so be it. Once AI can think better than us then our teachers are redundant and education system might finally be fixed. We can all become professional students
Maybe that's how things will turn out: Humans will be freed up not just from physical work but mental work as well and will be able to spend their time perusing things that actually interest them. Traditionally, working hard is seen as a virtue because it's been necessary. If there's robots and AI's that can not only do all the work but do it better than people can, work stops being necessary...and therefore, perhaps, less virtuous.
Depreciation encourages the adoption of new technologies, technologies that enable producers to make more efficient and effective use of scarce resources eg a new fridge that uses 30% less electricity than an old one, or modern tractors that drive themselves and calibrate their movements within centimetres reducing fuel, fertilizer and seed waste.
We could always ban power tools for carpenters and make them use hand saws and screw drivers, or ban cars and mandate the use of horse and carts. How much better would we be off? think of all the extra jobs.
Heheh, margaritas on the beach, our technological dystopia never sounded better. Banks writes joyous science-fiction about a post-scarcity world (look it up) where all the work is done by machines, and people spend their days indulging in all kinds of pleasures enhanced by their genetically engineered drug-secreting glands and the ever-present help/protection/companionship of super-intelligent AIs. Favourite pastimes include: thinking up ever-more extreme sports, safe in the knowledge a drone can zap into place to save you should you fall or whatever; zero-gravity orgies; studying any field that interests you; cruising around space on what are effectively cruise ships with populations in the billions; composing music for instruments that haven't even been invented; and lastly, doing whatever the turtle you like. No-one needs a job because there is no money, but if you want to work you can perform some productive function much less effectively than a machine.. if that's what turns you on. Made me feel much better about technological progress - though I still take my groceries to the checkout chick, but that's because I don't want to do her job for free
It's the lawyers I worry about. If AI starts taking their jobs they aren't much good for anything else. Probably HR and recruitment types as well.