What happens when we start taxing job stealing robots?

Robots won’t be hired.
They’ll be purchased, leased, or assembled in your garage from your 3D printer.

They won’t be stealing jobs. Stealing requires intention.
Hammers don’t steal jobs from rocks.

Robotics, like every other industry, will create jobs and careers, for as long as the public benefits from the industry.

Taxes will be paid by those who purchase, lease, and assemble them.

Er’body wins.

Minimum wage increases have absolutely nothing to do with the use of robots. That’s just a line that gets trotted out to provoke the economically fearful and the politically gullible. Industries have been automating their production lines since before there was a minimum wage, and robot workers will be the biggest boon to automation since the moving assembly line and interchangeable parts. They are inevitable, with or without a minimum wage hike.

What society has to do is figure out how we adjust to this newfound luxury. One short-term possibility is to institute some kind of universal basic income (which comes with a number of other benefits and has supporters all along the political spectrum). This leaves people free to pour their labor into the things they love and are best at—including the kind of work that robots can’t do—without having to worry about whether it will pay the bills. Seems like a pretty good trade.

I more and more think we will have to consider a universal basic income, or a shorter work week, or possibly both. Another possibility is a younger retirement age.

Robotics will create a shift in the job market like any time we mechanize tings. Some jobs disappear and some new ones pop up. I feel pretty sure there will be few jobs in total, especially if we keep the 40 hour work week, only an average of 2 weeks vacation time, and pushing employees to the limit in productivity.

It seems to me the trend will either go more and more towards the middle class diminishing, leaving upper and lower classes in greater numbers, or we will go towards a more socialized society. My hope is not either is done to an extreme, and there is a reasonable space where our middle class stays very large, but people get to lead easier and more joyful lives. Robotics will give us the opportunity for more freedom and happiness in my opinion, if we do it right. I feel pretty sure there is no way we will get it perfectly right initially.

I had not heard about this story. I did a Web search and found this

Robots don’t need social security and will not need it for the foreseeable future, so that seems a silly justification for taxing robots. The tax is at best a short term measure that will give some time for governments to come up with a scheme for handling the impact of automation. In the long term, robot costs will keep going down while productivity increases and eventually the tax will not be sufficient to discourage automation.

My guess as to what the future will be like, is that most jobs will be automated. This provides a major challenge as to how we will adjust.

With so many horrors threatening us right now—nuclear war, hurricanes, personal data hacking, global poverty and hunger, opoid and other drug addiction, crime, climate change and don’t even get me started on Trump, well, I’m having a real hard time worrying about robots.

Presumably it would be the robot owners being taxed, which is exactly what we already have.

Robots themselves don’t need an income as they don’t have any spending demands, and can’t be taxed—unless they’re sentient robots.

Instead of curtailing the spending power of robot owners through taxation, it would be far better to just have robots socially controlled and their productive output distributed across society without market mediation and for anyone’s profits. But I’m a socialist—so I think that’s better regardless of there being robots or not. Robots just make it even more of an imperative.

UBI is better than nothing, but it’s a bandaid solution.

Obviously you mean job stealing robot owners, like @Kropotkin noted.

@Kropotkin “UBI is better than nothing, but it’s a bandaid solution.”

Of course it’s a bandaid solution. All practicable short-term measures are bandaid solutions. But why do people say “bandaid solution” as if the term is pejorative—as if the change it would bring between now and whatever revolution may or may not be coming in the future is merely a clerical matter and not something felt by living, breathing human beings?

@Irukandji Because I didn’t feel like writing more on the topic. Some people regard UBI as a great solution and an end goal. Some see it as a way of maintaining capitalism.