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This is a very important topic as robotics and automation begin their exponential curve of running our lives. Who will own the robots? Will the majority of humanity be enslaved to rent-seekers who own patents on a robot hinge?
you must pay eternal rent to live. water, power, internet, etc.
At the beginning of civilization, the research budget for the invention of fire was zero, while the benefits of fire were incalculable. Compare this to the development costs of the next generation of Boeing aircraft relative to the small improvements in air travel. This dynamic has enormous implications for the presumed benefits of increases in government spending beyond some low base. Over time and with increasing c…
Presumably many people died or were injured, and property and landscape burned down during the development of fire as a commodity item. While there was no formal budget or currency, lives, property, and R&D time surely are not zero in the budget.
It's also a bit odd to refer to the incalculable benefits from a process done by our Homo erectus ancestor. The controlled use of fire surely pales in significance to our early tetrapod ancestors who learned to live on land.
> Rents are not always bad. Protections for intellectual property make sense not in spite of the rents they generate, but rather because of them. A patent, after all, is a temporary monopoly. These monopoly rents give incentives for innovation and allow innovators to cover the costs of research and development. This is a weird way to talk about IP and rent. Is profit from IP necessarily rent? The problem is that "ren…
Land, and natural opportunities in general, are the original and most fundamental source of rent.
Even the electromagnetic spectrum is monopolized. And although the holders of these exclusive rights do pay the FCC, they pay very little compared to the actual value.
Likewise, people pay very little in taxes compared to the true value of their land. Imagine if instead of having to pay income taxes and sales taxes, which disincentivize labor and business, we instead charged people for the use of land.
We could reform property taxes such that we exempt all building and improvement value, and just tax land.
This would encourage efficient use of land, reduce sprawl, and boost productivity because it would remove the deadweight loss of other taxes.
It would also be cheaper and simpler to collect, and less invasive.
At the beginning of civilization, the research budget for the invention of fire was zero, while the benefits of fire were incalculable. Compare this to the development costs of the next generation of Boeing aircraft relative to the small improvements in air travel. This dynamic has enormous implications for the presumed benefits of increases in government spending beyond some low base. Over time and with increasing c…
This is a very important topic as robotics and automation begin their exponential curve of running our lives. Who will own the robots? Will the majority of humanity be enslaved to rent-seekers who own patents on a robot hinge?
This is a very important topic as robotics and automation begin their exponential curve of running our lives. Who will own the robots? Will the majority of humanity be enslaved to rent-seekers who own patents on a robot hinge?
Assuming the following generalization is true:
(Energy + Material) → (Human + Time) → Yield
...and that this monadic generalization can be referred to as “Transmutation”, then:
(Transmutation) → Yield → (Transmutation) → Yield → (Transmutation) → …
...is also true, forming a transmutation chain.
These transmutation chains intersect upon world lines, forming trade networks. Humans currently have a monopoly on the transmutation process, and thus, all subsequent structures that process allows. That will not always be the case.
The industrial age increased the energy, material, and yield of transmutation while also reducing time. It also increased the speed on which yield is passed to the next transmutation process by while increasing the chain length. The overall network expanded because of these contributions. The fundamental human component remained the same, however. The delays between transmutation and critical bottlenecks of yield distribution in this network are where financial institutions reign.
With robotic transmutation, the energy variable changes dramatically. “Time value” is no longer a required energy input. Robotic transmutation has no concept of time, and thus, has no valuation upon it. This is not because the robot can't measure time, but because the humans that need the robot isolate the effects of time and decay from it. If the robot breaks down, a human fixes it, not the robot. Therefore, as long as the human/robotic symbiosis remains, the robot will never evolve to resolve the pressures of time value. Therefore, robots cannot establish the skill sets to manage time value pressures.
Humanity, for the foreseeable future according to my theories, will specialize to become a robotic workforces immune system. There will not be a revolt (Sorry social justice junkies, capitalists win again!) because robotic labor will provide access to frontiers previously inaccessible by today's configuration, specifically, deep earth mining and local space colonization.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Will the majority of humanity be enslaved to rent-seekers who own patents on a robot hinge?" Actually, that's easy: No. Humanity will not be enslaved to a small number of capital owners. But the reason isn't necessarily a happy one, which is that humanity will revolt and start destroying and probably kill lots of people and even potentially kill the goose laying the golden egg by destroying the robotic infrastructur…
I don't think violent revolt is quite necessary. We certainly seem to be seeing a non-violent revolt happening in the entertainment industry. People, unhappy with the way the music and movie industry have been trying to leverage their monopolistic power over certain franchises, have turned to non-violently pirating media, to the point that, for a lot of people, and many properties, the easiest mode of obtaining them…
I think the fear here is that at some point the relevant servants of the tyrant will all be technological constructs unable of sitting down. If we're really careful about making sure our robot army doesn't revolt then what happens when a tyrant controls them?
See also: The Law of Rent Land, and natural opportunities in general, are the original and most fundamental source of rent. Even the electromagnetic spectrum is monopolized. And although the holders of these exclusive rights do pay the FCC, they pay very little compared to the actual value. Likewise, people pay very little in taxes compared to the true value of their land. Imagine if instead of having to pay income t…
> Rents are not always bad. Protections for intellectual property make sense not in spite of the rents they generate, but rather because of them. A patent, after all, is a temporary monopoly. These monopoly rents give incentives for innovation and allow innovators to cover the costs of research and development. This is a weird way to talk about IP and rent. Is profit from IP necessarily rent? The problem is that "ren…