I like the idea of taxing machines (and use that for UBI)
Today the race between human and machines is not so much 'unfair' because of the machines' speed and efficiency, but moreso because of unfair taxes: people and businesses get to pay taxes for each hour of human labour, but receive tax deductions for using all non-human resources like energy, machines and offices.
It's time to rethink the tax and economic models such that a lot of people will benefit from machines' efficiency, not only the happy few who happen to be in control.
How do you propose "taxing machines"? Everything I can think of has obvious and large downsides, e.g.
- filing taxes for each machine (companies may have millions of machines)
- determining how much income all machines make (for machines used by humans, e.g. sewing machines, how do you determine what percentage of the income is made by the human vs the machine)
- taxing cloud usage (How to determine netflix's % income made by cloud vs by advertising, by original content, etc)
> - filing taxes for each machine (companies may have millions of machines)
Yes. It may be harder to figure out the definition of a machine - e.g. a computer can have multiple programs running, is it one machine? - but this is one direction.
> - determining how much income all machines make
Yes, it's tricky, but we can try. For example, some temporary measurements which can be updated every few years?
> - taxing cloud usage
Yes, we can measure power, bandwidth, network sessions for that.
Probably best to move to Asia or India and apply for a role, you're more likely to get hired as 30% of the jobs are being replaced overseas.
While this kind of behavior isn't new, I think its happening more often now.
Will software development be considered national security later down the road (like how making chips are) when most of it is done overseas? As I imagine it will be, along with AI.
Of course the bootcamps flooded the market as well, but H1B visa workers are another way to saturate the market, to keep costs low. I know they say they need workers with experience or training we can't get here, but you know most of the workers hired are just doing CRUD software, they aren't building an AGI-atomic-surgeon.
Noticed strong candidates are somewhat easier to find than one year ago (talking about sr roles here), but other than that see no drying up, maybe different in US or maybe this article just being dramatic to get clicks
Classic BusinessInsider article with no actual insight or sources, just a few shallow quotes and sensational extracts.
This article could have been written anytime between 2000-2004, because apart from AI, we were saying the same things, IE: tech is imploding, jobs are going overseas, etc. Instead things went along for a while and then tech salaries and demand for tech workers exploded. There will always be pressure on tech and those young people coming out of places like Berkeley will have it better than those coming out of NoNameU. The past decade or so tech has been the main thing propping up the labor market and the stock market, so not unrealistic that there would eventually be a rebalancing.
Whether it's true or not I don't know but it would be good if fewer people went into tech.
We don't need more people working for ad companies endlessly rewriting chat apps in the flavor of the month JavaScript framework. We need people doing useful jobs like building houses (or making house building easier), basic research, medicine, social work, plumbing, or HVAC.