some republicans push carbon tax

[spacemonkey]

[Spider]

[John Galt]

to be fair to the spaced monkey, he already stated that automated factories ought be taxed. then you said, "hey BILL GATES said something about taxing robots. So what do? SO WHAT DO?"

like, i honestly don't understand what you are asking him to answer, mainly because the question you asked repeatedly is a sentence fragment, "so what do?". i think he wants to tax robots, but i also think this is punitive so that people will hire humans instead rather than tax so we can live like hedonismbot

luddites have, time and time again, said this same nonsense. when this great country was founded by spreading the blood of patriots and tyrants, the population was overwhelming agrarian: roughly 90%. technology has improved this down to around 2%. yet one must ask, are the rest of us not working as the luddites would warn of, or have we found gainful employment doing other things? so too will we find gainful endeavors in our glorious transhuman future. and in these next few decades we can look back to those pioneering times when our forefathers from england rounded up all the undesirables and shipped them off to america, canada, and australia: the asteroid belt awaits, son

[spacemonkey]

Do robots have families and shop at the mall? No, so that part of the economic engine dies. Robots don't buy gas or cars to get to work, so that part of the economic engine dies. Get the picture where I'm going here?

[a777pilot]

Wind and solar are not, repeat, not the solution to cheap readily available power for all. The answer is thorium nuclear power, but then I guess none of you know the advantages of thorium nuclear power. You see "nuclear" and immediately think bomb.

Do some research.

[Spider]

[John Galt]

[exploited]

[spacemonkey]

[Spider]

Simple question galt.

There are 20 jobs. There are 25 job seekers.

What exactly are those 5 spares meant to do in terms of "doing something else with their life"?

This entire mode of thought is instantly flattened by 2nd grade math. This isn't the 19th century. The old examples no longer apply. Yes, you can replace telegraph operators. But what exactly are 100 million assemblers in China meant to do when their jobs evaporate? Scarcity is different, now. Growth is different now. Skill and education ceilings are different now. We have software that creates art, Galt. Software that writes music. Software that writes news articles. Soon the entire transport industry, from cars to trains to seagoing container ships...will be automated. And so on and so forth.

Every time you people point to a past century and espouse the mantra that people can forever just "do something else". Which has worked because there has continued to be new things that require people. This belief in infinite employment springing up from a magical bottomless pit is religion. Our population growth curves have developed to support the trajectory of industrialization and globalization. We won't be able to support population like this as the need for their productivity diminishes. Not unless something gives.

I am not a Luddite. My field requires about 1/100th the manpower it did even in the last century. But I'm not so blinded by ideology that I can't f**k add and subtract. If the final solution to maintaining viability of this requires people heading for the Kuiper Belt...your going to be disappointed.