Robots are leaving the factory floor and heading for your desk – and your job

"It could be said that the job of bridge toll collector was invented in San Francisco."

Romans did collect taxes for using a bridge 2.000 years ago.

There was the alternative of crossing the river yourself or hiring someone to do it(ferrymen).

I have been working in automation for a while. It is true that companies could fire more and more people and replace it with robots because they are less expensive.

It is also true that now people could compete with big guys much cheaper because robots will become dirt cheap. We are starting to see with 3d printers(that are robots themselves).

War has started, big guys are ok with people playing with toys in their basements, but want to make it illegal for small guys to compete with them.

This is what software and business patents are about. Only big guys, most of whom were in the past little guys , creating a legislation in order to make it impossible for newcomers to do with them what they did to others in the past.

"Will robots cause unemployment or create new types of jobs and increased leisure time for humans?"

Usual false dichotomy. It can be both, or neither. Robots are nothing novel. You can replace "robots" with "farm machinery" or "construction equipment" and ask the same question--except then, then answers are clearer, which makes the absurdity of this question apparent. Farm machinery probably created unemployment among farm hands. On the other hand, rich countries would not have the same standard of living they have today if half their labor forces were on farms.

"Will robots cause unemployment or... increased leisure time for humans?"

These aren't mutually exclusive.

Most interesting possibility: there will be an inflection point in the way we do production & distribution. The capital costs and inefficiencies of distributed production fall every day (internet to distribute knowledge, ever-advancing low-N fabrication technology) while the disadvantages of centralized production increase (capital is becoming more important, labor less important, meaning the average split of the proceeds is ever more extractive). At some point people on the bottom rungs will find it advantageous to work for "communes" instead of employers. Scare quotes because there's a lot of back-to-nature & peacenik baggage associated with the word "commune" that doesn't necessarily apply here -- it's just a different structure for production and employment that avoids the deleveraging effects of forcing people to compete for a spot in a shrinking global pool of jobs. The communes I'm picturing would make heavy use of industrial technology and compete against one another for people by advertising the benefits they offer vs the labor required for membership.

Less disruptive: mandatory reduction in workweek to restore supply/demand balance in unskilled labor market.

Costly but traditional: Basic/minimum income. Expansion of traditional welfare programs. Society creaks along having found the minimum handout required to keep people from doing something about the problem.

Cynical: civic unrest, police crackdown, rinse, repeat, spiral out of control. We've all seen the movies.

Unless it is literally sitting in a vault (it isn't), Apple's cash is being used for stuff. Here's an article about that:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/1246081-apple-does-not-have-...

I don't really get the idea of a robot tax, why make special rules for one particular type of productivity? Should accountants that use better software also pay higher taxes than less efficient accountants that use simple calculators and paper?