alt Hacker News> When the tree of costs that make up a product are traced, surely all the leaf nodes are human labour?
What about energy, real estate and taxes?
Even at the extreme end of automation, if you want iron ore, you need to buy a mine from somebody, pay taxes on it, and power the machines to extract the minerals and transport them elsewhere for processing.
The same logic applies to energy I think. We don't have to pay money to a wind turbine, or to a coal mine. We only pay money to humans to build the power plants and the grid.
If I were writing a sci-fi novel about this I don't know how I'd handle something real estate (or mineral rights or water rights). You already need permission from the government to extract resources.
As for taxes, why does the government even want the money? What are they going to do with it?