8mo ago

I’m in a park. The grass is being mown by a robot.

We thought the rider fell off or something and it was going to crash. Then it turned and kept mowing. Park Roomba!

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213 comments

Automation isn't the enemy.
As ever, the owner class that hoards and wages economic war on you though automation for their exclusive benefit at their society's expense are your enemy, whether you would fight them or not.
Arguing that we should "save" back breaking, repetitive unnatural movement, manual labor jobs that break human bodies by the time they're 40 is the WRONG hill to die on. Fight for the citizenry to reap the benefits of automation through taxation, not to keep shitty jobs robots can do faster and better. Fight to change the economy so that everyone doesn't need meaningless jobs machines can do better so we can have actual time to live our lives.
Taxing the fuck out of automation would let everyone win, because a heavily taxed robot is still far cheaper for the company than a human or possibly several humans for that one robot would be, so automation is here either way. We can riot to change our economy to benefit from this technology as we should, or we can be steamrolled yet again by the dictates of the affluent who will demand and get all the benefits and none of the responsibility if not confronted and countered on revolutionary terms.
Please pick the former. There's no dignity or meaning to be had shuffling boxes around in an Amazon warehouse. Begging the owners to let us try to continue to compete with literal purpose built repetitive labor machines is not the way.
- Fun fact: The Luddites weren’t opposed to technology. In many cases, they built the machines they would later destroy.
  What they opposed was the ownership structure. The fact that they could be 30x more productive, yet be paid less than before because the required skill level was lower, and the working conditions were now dangerous and demeaning.
  Yet when someone says “luddite” now, what do you think? A dummy who’s afraid of having cool stuff?
- Good points, but I have one thing to add. You shouldn't tax automation. You should increase corporate taxes for all companies. If you funded a UBI with that, it would solve lots of unemployment related problems: crime, poverty, etc. But it's hard, simple but hard.
- Put the corporate tax rate back up to 40% or more and implement a 10% robot tax on top of that. Then after that, implement a UBI starting at $1000 a month for US citizens with no strings attached, increasing with inflation over time. Solved for the next decade.
  
  The top marginal tax rate should be 100%. The bottom marginal tax rate should be negative.
- It's too bad that the first things to be automated are the tasks that people don't mind doing, leaving the real shitty tasks to be done by people. Riding around on a lawnmower has to be one of the most enjoyable forms of manual labour. Now the robots get the good jobs and we're left with the backbreaking monotonous bullshit.
- Now do AI!

213 comments