Britain's Jeremy Corbin Calls for Robot Tax
Tech companies wealth needs to be shared, he says
Labour leader Jeremy Corbin's address at the Labour party conference to highlight examining policies to offset future job displacement by automation in Britain. As jobs are lost to robots and A.I. and companies reap the benefits of fewer labor costs and higher production, Corbin is suggesting a 'Robot Tax.'
Like a lot of politicians bringing up the issue, Corbin believes the extra profits tech companies receive through automation could be used to assist workers displaced by technology. And those same monies could be used for training workers for new roles.
The issue, nearly by the day, is becoming a hot-button one. A strong counter-argument suggests Corbin and his pro-tax policies would do more harm than good. Taxing would just hinder A.I. development and prevent the economic pie from expanding, upsetting its true potential. It would also throw up yet another hurdle for small entrepreneurs in market competition with tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.
Retraining society for new roles too optimistic, according to a new Oxford study
But it may be in vain anyway. A new Oxford study, previously mentioned by Impact A.I., came to the conclusion that, retraining for new roles, while a nice thought, will accomplish little. As A.I. becomes more advanced and takes over more complex tasks, human labor will be squeezed into more specific type tasks until the end results are zero, the study says.
Production will become a companies capitalization in which it will own. Currently, companies don't own people. In an optimistic model, being championed by most in tech leadership, human labor and A.I. will compliment one another. In Susskind's model this can't work, or at least, it will be of little benefit to workers.
That's because of the squeezing out of human labor by automation. And secondly, an increased role in production by AI will eventually cut off the flow of capital to labor, as a traditional model of capitalization transforms into an advanced model. A model that sends more and more capital toward ownership, according to the study. See next section.
From Daniel Susskind's, A Model of Technological Unemployment:
That the consequences of this ‘task encroachment’ are so pessimistic for labor – a remorseless displacement of labor, a continual fall in absolute wages, and technological unemployment – suggests the traditional literature may have already created a false sense of optimism about the prospects for labor. Note again, however, that for the owners of capital this conclusion is far from pessimistic. All the returns to technological progress flow to them.24 From an equity standpoint, it follows that who owns and controls capital in this model becomes an increasingly important question over time.
Optimist argues that A.I. will create new demands for goods that only humans can produce
Once again Susskind's study is not so sure. According to Susskind:
A new alternative is a demand-side version of the race – where consumers demand different goods and services that in turn require new types of tasks to produce them. This claim is often made informally – for instance, in making a case for optimism, Mokyr et al. (2015) argues “the future will surely bring new products that are currently barely imagined”, Autor and Dorn (2013) discusses “new products and services that raise national income”, and Autor (2014) appeals to the unforeseen rise of “health care, finance, informational technology, consumer electronics, hospitality, leisure, and entertainment” to explain why those displaced from farming in the 20th century would not lack for work in the 21st. Only a model like the one in this paper, with a variety of goods, is capable of exploring this demand-side version. Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017), with a unique final good, cannot. Optimism will only follow, though, if the new goods and services that have to be produced require tasks in which labor, and not advanced capital, has the comparative advantage.
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