A worrying part of the current plans and suggestions over AI:
They raise the prospect of a levy on businesses that profit from replacing workers with robots amid fears widespread automation could trigger spiralling unemployment.
This would be phantabulously silly. For the entire aim and point of all and any economic advance is to destroy jobs. Therefore taxing people who do what we desire - kill jobs by automating a task - would be to be taxing the very thing we want to be happening.
Just as a side note here, producing something with the use of less labour is known as “raising productivity”. It’s a major preoccupation of current politics that productivity growth in Britain is slow. Yet here we’ve got a suggestion for a tax on anyone trying to solve that problem. Go figure.
To come back to the main point - we not just desire but positively lust after jobs being destroyed.
Firstly, if we gain the output we desire with the use of less human labour then that means there’s more human leisure to go around at that same collective standard of living. The work/life balance gets better in the modern argot. This is again something that politics tries to engineer but here they are suggesting taxing it.
Going a little deeper we again lust after that job killing. Say that - just imagine - we had a system where 90% needed to work in the fields to feed 100% of the people. Then we invented some set of machinery that means that we only needed 2% to feed all. We could, as a ragbag word for all that technology, call it “the tractor”. This then gives us 88% of the population without a job.
Or, 88% of the population can do something else with their time instead of scraping in a muddy field. Ballet, write computer games, run libraries, staff the NHS even, horrors, run diversity training courses. The tractor has made us richer not as a result of the food that arrives. Rather, we’re richer by the value of the ballet, computer games, libraries, NHS and diversity courses we now also enjoy as well as the food.
That freed up human labour does something else. The next set of human labour - say an AI that produces endless pomposity about diversity - frees up the labour currently devoted to that task to do something else. Anything else - we’re still all richer as a result. For we will now have diversity classes and also that something else - we’re richer.
As to what else well, what does anyone want done? Is every human desire and want currently sated? No? Therefore there are still jobs to be done, aren’t there? It is only possible for there to be and end to this when all such human wants are sated - and what would be the problem with no jobs if we all already had everything?
Taxing this process, attempting to deliberately stop people increasing productivity, killing jobs, is as we say, phantabulously silly.
Perhaps what we really need is an increase in the productivity of economic education. Perhaps we should be ladling the based ideas onto those Rolls Royce minds with JCBs instead of shovels - or the teaspoons presumably responsible for this foolishness.
Taxing productivity increases by automation, my gluteal fundament.