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‘Robots’ Are Not 'Coming for Your Job'–Management Is

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Re: ‘Robots’ Are Not 'Coming for Your Job'–Management Is

#21

Post by rajampoc »

Kalium wrote: post #20
jeena wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At 19 when I started working at a factory which right before my eyes replaced a brigade of humans with big machines which were all operated by one human I wondered why we're not taxing the machine work as we taxed the human work before. I still haven't found a answer to that. Don't the humans lose a lot of tax income when machines replace humans? And couldn't that money pay the replaced humans at least a decent life…

We do tax them! We tax the value of the factory, we tax the company's profits, and we tax the goods the robots when they are sold. The robots were also taxed when they were purchased. As I understand it, the human work probably wasn't directly taxed. I'm guessing that what was taxed as the incomes of the humans. This may seem like a meaningless distinction, but the humans have other opportunities to earn taxable inco…

Human work is taxed. It's called the income tax. There's little opportunity to earn money by working and avoid income taxes.

Re: ‘Robots’ Are Not 'Coming for Your Job'–Management Is

#22

Post by notme77 »

mbrumlow wrote: post #16
notme77 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's targeting what is easiest to automate. This happens to be mostly low skilled workers. Software engineers constantly cannibalize their own jobs, but there are so many positions for software engineers available (or potentially available) that we (software engineers) don't feel the affects.

Seems like CEOs could be replaced with a spread sheet. As far as I can tell most CEOs basically follow a spread sheet provided by the PE that owns the company. So I never knew why PE would ever seek to fire the 30k a year office manager, when they could fire the 7 figure CEO and half his management team -- if meetings need to be had, we can still have meetings rooms and all the spread sheets can show them self on the…

The CEO is the CEO because he makes profitable decisions. You have to replace her with someone / something that makes at least equally good decisions.

Re: ‘Robots’ Are Not 'Coming for Your Job'–Management Is

#23

Post by mreome »

rajampoc wrote: post #21
Kalium wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do tax them! We tax the value of the factory, we tax the company's profits, and we tax the goods the robots when they are sold. The robots were also taxed when they were purchased. As I understand it, the human work probably wasn't directly taxed. I'm guessing that what was taxed as the incomes of the humans. This may seem like a meaningless distinction, but the humans have other opportunities to earn taxable inco…

Human work is taxed. It's called the income tax. There's little opportunity to earn money by working and avoid income taxes.

You can do any kind of work without pay and you don't get taxed. If you do nothing all day but are paid for it, you still get taxed. Income tax taxes income, not work.

I think the point Kalium was trying to make is that it's not possible to quantify the value of human labor without pinning it to the income someone earns from doing it. A programmer's job is less physically labor intensive then a farm worker's, who obviously earns less. And there are numerous skills and fields more complex then programming that nobody will pay as much, or at all, for someone to do.

For a machine, it's value is directly tied to the profits gained by it's operation relative to it's operating costs, which is the business income that is already taxed. I think the taxing of machine "work" jeena was asking for would basically just be an increase in taxes on corporate profits, perhaps with some variation based on how many people they employ relative to their profits.

Re: ‘Robots’ Are Not 'Coming for Your Job'–Management Is

#24

Post by conanbatt »

notme77 wrote: post #11
conanbatt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do find some perversion in the way the market tackles this issue: the market attacks the lowest paying people first, trying to automate the low-skill jobs, as opposed to attacking things like CEO compensation at 100 million, or software engineers making 200k in silicon valley. I think the market is being inefficient here, and I don't know if its a market failure (lowest paying people have the lowest bargaining powe…

It's targeting what is easiest to automate. This happens to be mostly low skilled workers. Software engineers constantly cannibalize their own jobs, but there are so many positions for software engineers available (or potentially available) that we (software engineers) don't feel the affects.

It should target what is most valuable to automate. Thats normally how markets work.

Re: ‘Robots’ Are Not 'Coming for Your Job'–Management Is

#25

Post by conanbatt »

pixelrevision wrote: post #14
conanbatt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do find some perversion in the way the market tackles this issue: the market attacks the lowest paying people first, trying to automate the low-skill jobs, as opposed to attacking things like CEO compensation at 100 million, or software engineers making 200k in silicon valley. I think the market is being inefficient here, and I don't know if its a market failure (lowest paying people have the lowest bargaining powe…

It's people relying on the market to fix everything. It works quite well for some things but not so much as a social contract. CEOs in the past were not making the same kind of percentages but most of that was not based on the market, it was based on push back such as unions and not wanting to appear greedy.

Unions are plenty greedy. In SF, police officers make 400k, bart officials make 300k+ and firemen make 200k+.

They are also part of the (general) problem. And all of those jobs should also be targets of automation.

Re: ‘Robots’ Are Not 'Coming for Your Job'–Management Is

#26

Post by conanbatt »

jandrese wrote: post #18
pixelrevision wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's people relying on the market to fix everything. It works quite well for some things but not so much as a social contract. CEOs in the past were not making the same kind of percentages but most of that was not based on the market, it was based on push back such as unions and not wanting to appear greedy.

The market is only good for optimizing cashflow. It doesn't care one bit about human needs or happiness. External factors are needed if you care about humans. Having a bunch of factory jobs replaced by a machine is an excellent example of this. People are blaming the management, but really it's the market forcing it. If the management here doesn't do this and their competitors do, they'll become uncompetitive and eve…

My argument is the opposite though..the market is NOT targeting the most profitable places to attack.

I would extend the "automate" to more the more generalized "innovate".

Re: ‘Robots’ Are Not 'Coming for Your Job'–Management Is

#27

Post by [deleted] »

mreome wrote: post #23
rajampoc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human work is taxed. It's called the income tax. There's little opportunity to earn money by working and avoid income taxes.

You can do any kind of work without pay and you don't get taxed. If you do nothing all day but are paid for it, you still get taxed. Income tax taxes income, not work. I think the point Kalium was trying to make is that it's not possible to quantify the value of human labor without pinning it to the income someone earns from doing it. A programmer's job is less physically labor intensive then a farm worker's, who obv…

[deleted]

Re: ‘Robots’ Are Not 'Coming for Your Job'–Management Is

#28

Post by hakfoo »

notme77 wrote: post #22
mbrumlow wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like CEOs could be replaced with a spread sheet. As far as I can tell most CEOs basically follow a spread sheet provided by the PE that owns the company. So I never knew why PE would ever seek to fire the 30k a year office manager, when they could fire the 7 figure CEO and half his management team -- if meetings need to be had, we can still have meetings rooms and all the spread sheets can show them self on the…

The CEO is the CEO because he makes profitable decisions. You have to replace her with someone / something that makes at least equally good decisions.

From that perspective, the big question is if their decisions statistically more profitable than cheaper alternatives.

There are some companies on a very predictable path. You could replace Eddie Lampert or Johnny Ive with a D20 mapped to management tactics and get pretty much the same outcomes at least on a short to mid term.

Plenty of competent companies have enough self-contained knowledge that you could make good decisions simply by surveying the on-the-ground employees, weighting them in some way, and generating policy that way. One would hope a widget factory with a combined 200,000 man-years of widget industry experience would know more about the widget business than a drop-in CEO that had to look up what a widget was on Wikipedia before he made his introduction speech.

I suspect the real justification for the wildly overpaid C-suite is that you need someone to be a scapegoat for Wall Street's whims.

A local and autonomous team that knows their market and is competent is not going to sack half of their own to finance a stock buyback, but a $30 million a year stuffed suit can impose it from above.

Re: ‘Robots’ Are Not 'Coming for Your Job'–Management Is

#29

Post by mbrumlow »

notme77 wrote: post #22
mbrumlow wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like CEOs could be replaced with a spread sheet. As far as I can tell most CEOs basically follow a spread sheet provided by the PE that owns the company. So I never knew why PE would ever seek to fire the 30k a year office manager, when they could fire the 7 figure CEO and half his management team -- if meetings need to be had, we can still have meetings rooms and all the spread sheets can show them self on the…

The CEO is the CEO because he makes profitable decisions. You have to replace her with someone / something that makes at least equally good decisions.

The vast majority of decisions that make or break companies are not done by the CEO. Or any of the C level people.

Most companies are like a train. The C level guys mostly report to the board where they think the train is going to be -- which is normally wag or ferry tail.

I know I am speaking in broad terms. There are companies out there where the CEO matters, but those are few and far .

Re: ‘Robots’ Are Not 'Coming for Your Job'–Management Is

#30

Post by dahart »

conanbatt wrote: post #25
pixelrevision wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's people relying on the market to fix everything. It works quite well for some things but not so much as a social contract. CEOs in the past were not making the same kind of percentages but most of that was not based on the market, it was based on push back such as unions and not wanting to appear greedy.

Unions are plenty greedy. In SF, police officers make 400k, bart officials make 300k+ and firemen make 200k+. They are also part of the (general) problem. And all of those jobs should also be targets of automation.

> In SF, police officers make 400k

Where are you getting this data?

“San Francisco offers excellent benefits and the current starting salary is $87,230 per year. After seven years of service a Police Officer may earn up to $129,896 per year.”

https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/careers/sworn-j...

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