Category: Automation Impact on Jobs

Lawrence Summers says Bill Gates’ idea for a robot tax is “profoundly misguided”

Lawrence Summers says Bill Gates’ idea for a robot tax is “profoundly misguided”

Should robot workers be taxed like human workers? (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) In a recent interview with Quartz , Bill Gates floated an idea for mitigating the impact of automation technology on human jobs: tax the robots. Governments could use the revenue, he argued, to fund social safety-net programs and support jobs that still require human empathy and understanding.

But Harvard economist and former US Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers calls the suggestion “profoundly misguided.” In a Washington Post op-ed published March 5, he laid out his reasons for his skepticism. Taxing technologies is a slippery slope

Summers argues that […]

Robots Aren’t Out to Get Us All

Robots Aren’t Out to Get Us All

Editor’s Note: This commentary is part of a bi-monthly column in partnership with South Texas Money Management . Are people in danger of being replaced by robots? Concerns regarding automation and worker displacement, which have been around for centuries, have experienced a recent uptick. Most of these concerns are misplaced, particularly if effective policies are in place.

The real wealth of a country consists of the output of goods and services that its countrymen and women have access to. The fear that automation will destroy jobs rests on the assumption that there is a fixed amount of goods that buyers […]

The Economist explainsHow to make robots pay their fair share

The Economist explainsHow to make robots pay their fair share

THE future looks increasingly perilous for the human worker. New robots are no longer flummoxed by staircases and doorknobs; clever software is capable of driving cars and carrying on (rudimentary) conversations. While a workless world remains a distant possibility, a period of automation-driven disruption seems to loom ahead. Many futurists reckon that as machines replace people, governments will need to find ways to redistribute income from the machines (and the people who own them) to displaced workers, to ensure that the benefits of automation-driven growth are shared widely. In a recent interview Bill Gates proposed one method for doing […]

Will Industrial Automation Truly Take Our Jobs?

Recently there was a programmer from San Francisco who had managed to automate his work. For six years he didn’t lift a finger to his workplace. Thankfully, he didn’t have any friends who would check up on him – just some developers who would occasionally ask him about the software he was testing. Automation helped him play League of Legends by skipping work.

Even though it sounds fun, there is an underlying horror at this instance. This means that this guy was able to create software that would put him out of work. Eventually, the man did lose his job […]

Dutch anger is about robots, and immigrants

From the towering offices of Rotterdam’s port authority, you can watch the never-ending stream of barges begin their river journeys to the Rhine and points across Europe, carrying everything from Chinese microwave ovens to iron ore from Brazil.

Rotterdam boasts Europe’s biggest port, which depends on the globalized economy for its success and 130,000 jobs. Yet this North Sea gateway to the world is also the birthplace of an anti-globalization, anti-immigrant and anti-Islam movement that is on course to place first in Dutch elections on March 15.

The appeal of its current leader, the peroxide blond Geert Wilders, seems a paradox […]

Workplace automation anf the future of employment.

Kickstart
The Oracle

Joined: 04 Feb 2002
Karma : Itchy wrote: Nope… Prices would increase by a multiple of the wage increase. In the past it was x2.5 salary. Then went to x2.5 of combined salary. Then slowly crept up to x3 then x4 then x5. With wages being pretty static it’s the easy credit as a facsimile of crash that is boosting prices. Only if the multiplier rose and credit cost lowered. But even without that it would still ramp up rental prices, which would in turn ramp up sale prices […]

Primary metals manufacturing has lost 84,000 jobs over last decade

Primary metals manufacturing has lost 84,000 jobs over last decade

Last year, primary metals manufacturing lost 8,600 jobs, a decline of 2.2 percent. The subsector has lost 27,100 jobs since 2014, a decline of 6.7 percent.

The Alliance for American Manufacturing blamed about 19,000 layoffs in the steel industry over the past few years on a global import crisis triggered by rampant overcapacity that led China to dump steel below cost across the world. Nearly a third of the steel purchased in the United States in 2015 was made overseas, and steelmakers responded by cuts at Gary Works, East Chicago Tin and other local mills.

Industry observers also have pointed to […]

Factory automation tax unnecessary

Factory automation tax unnecessary

Photo Credit: Creative Commons In a recent interview with news website “Quartz,” Bill Gates offered a rather unconventional approach to the growing use of robots in factories, asserting that robots who replace human workers should incur the same tax rates as the human workers’ income taxes would have incurred.

According to Gates, “Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at […]

A ‘robot tax’ is not the way to save jobs

A 'robot tax' is not the way to save jobs

© Getty Images When two diametrically opposed figures such as Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Benoît Hamon, the Socialist candidate in the French presidential election, both come out in favor of a "robot tax," that should set the alarm bells ringing.

The tax is supposed to restore the balance between man and machine. However, there are better paths we can go down than this.

Unemployment The two gentlemen are right to be concerned. In their famous 2013 study, Michael Osborne and Carl Frey of Oxford University concluded that "about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk from automation."Later […]

How would a ‘robot tax’ work?

How would a 'robot tax' work?

On February 17, Bill Gates set the news agenda around the world by declaring that a so-called "robot tax" should be introduced in order to counteract job losses caused by automation. "Right now," he told online publication Quartz , "the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory has that income taxed. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level."

There is no doubting that Gates’ vision of job displacement is not of a distant dystopian future, but today’s reality: in 2015 expenditure […]