51–60 of 80 posts
He wanted a pay-to-view internet super-highway too. Only the consumers decided and favored the open WWW instead of his The Microsoft Network (as can be found preinstalled in Win95) - He had to rewrite his The Road Ahead 1995 book after 6 months, as WWW won. (first edition is hardcover, second edition is paperback)
That piqued my curiosity - didn't know that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Dial-up
Interesting Benoît Hamon a french candidate to presidential propose the same idea. The definition of robot is not clear for the moment.
Is Siri a robot? Or is Siri thousands of robots working in concert to create the illusion of a single agent?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
new jobs will be created just like they always have been I think that hypothesis is what Bill Gates is questioning. The rate of change is far quicker than anything we've seen before, so using historical examples of how jobs have been created when technology puts people out of work as evidence of what will happen is grossly flawed. There's a possibility that we won't invent new jobs in time. We should think about what…
If there's no way to invent jobs then we've reached an utopia where robots do everything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
new jobs will be created just like they always have been I think that hypothesis is what Bill Gates is questioning. The rate of change is far quicker than anything we've seen before, so using historical examples of how jobs have been created when technology puts people out of work as evidence of what will happen is grossly flawed. There's a possibility that we won't invent new jobs in time. We should think about what…
> We should think about what that means Free market economy doesn't think ahead, that's both it's strength and weakness. Government tries to think ahead. A taxation on robots might be a way to ease the road to the future _if_ the market doesn't invent jobs in the rate robots/automation in general takes them away. If you are a person with faith in the market the argument is easy, it's non-marketist to think ahead and…
It's not the first time I read such a thing, but I'm curious: what makes you think free markets don't think ahead? Don't most businesses try to anticipate future demand? Do such things as futures markets not exist? Aren't stocks valued as discounted cashflows of future dividends?
This is a very smart idea. Taxes' primary function is to finance what can only be provided by government in our society. With the advent of robots as a major part of our working force taxing them is a way to get money for the public good. Why shouldn't they be taxed? The alternative is for the robots and their owners to get a free ride while still using society's infrastructure. Taxing robots is probably not enough.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We should think about what that means Free market economy doesn't think ahead, that's both it's strength and weakness. Government tries to think ahead. A taxation on robots might be a way to ease the road to the future _if_ the market doesn't invent jobs in the rate robots/automation in general takes them away. If you are a person with faith in the market the argument is easy, it's non-marketist to think ahead and…
One of the problems with HN is that it's sometimes hard to tell when people are being serious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We should think about what that means Free market economy doesn't think ahead, that's both it's strength and weakness. Government tries to think ahead. A taxation on robots might be a way to ease the road to the future _if_ the market doesn't invent jobs in the rate robots/automation in general takes them away. If you are a person with faith in the market the argument is easy, it's non-marketist to think ahead and…
> Free market economy doesn't think ahead, that's both it's strength and weakness. It's not the first time I read such a thing, but I'm curious: what makes you think free markets don't think ahead? Don't most businesses try to anticipate future demand? Do such things as futures markets not exist? Aren't stocks valued as discounted cashflows of future dividends?
> There's a possibility that we won't invent new jobs in time. We should think about what that means.
Of course the market ponders the future but only in order to make the largest profits and it can only think about things that easily can be reduced to money/value. So what I meant was more that it can't think about the "meaning" of a current trend, ie jobs going away. In retrospect it _can_ see what the change "meant" for the economy.
What I'm saying that that we can try to think about the possibility that automatization will eat jobs at a rate greater than it creates jobs. We can hypothesize that there will be a new equilibrium in the future. If that time is decades away and during this process many people will be thrown out of a meaningful/constructive way of life where you have a job into a highly stressful hankering along on random shit it might be a good idea that we together (those who have jobs) pool a part of our income and provide something like a minimum wage (or something that we think out which is super way better) by taxation. Sacrificing a bit of the speed of which the the total capital accumulates with the 1% in order to provide a better life for the 99%.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Free market economy doesn't think ahead, that's both it's strength and weakness. It's not the first time I read such a thing, but I'm curious: what makes you think free markets don't think ahead? Don't most businesses try to anticipate future demand? Do such things as futures markets not exist? Aren't stocks valued as discounted cashflows of future dividends?
Well I was referring to the parent comment. > There's a possibility that we won't invent new jobs in time. We should think about what that means. Of course the market ponders the future but only in order to make the largest profits and it can only think about things that easily can be reduced to money/value. So what I meant was more that it can't think about the "meaning" of a current trend, ie jobs going away. In re…
By the same logic the person who was put out of work by a piece of software made by Microsoft should result in the company using the Microsoft product to create value should be taxed as well. Right? So his statement that robot companies should not be concerned is pretty disingenuous if you ask me. Of course they will be concerned along with the companies. We should be coming up with incentives to give people jobs rat…
I think Gates meant this more as a thought experiment, since he can't seriously think we can define a "robot." We need to find ways to cope with the speed of automation, by finding more revenue for putting displaced people back to work. How can we get the labor participation rate (62% and dropping) back to the pre-recession levels, as we fight both aging and automation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The money for this would have to come from somewhere. Thus it makes sense to tax the biggest beneficiaries, the capital owners who permanently replaced workers with machines. They're paying because they're gaining the most. How do you know they're gaining the most? That depends on the relative elasticities. Economics is not zero-sum. Even the unemployed people will gain in the long-term as the gains trickle down an…
How do you know they're gaining the most? Because profits go up, but wages are stagnant. Corporations are increasingly cutting benefits, pensions, and treating employees as contractors and outsourcing. Millennials today are poorer than their parents were. This is the age we live in, profit maximization over everything else. The rich got richer, but the middle class and poor haven't seen any of these gains. Why should…
And that's not even always possible. People who are easily replaced by robots aren't going to suddenly start building those robots; it's likely above their intellectual ceiling. As low skilled jobs are replaced by fewer and fewer high skilled jobs, low skilled workers will be left permanently out in the cold.
Education can be a solution generationally, but the notion that an older person is going to suddenly go back to school to learn a new trade is simply not how people in general work.