alt Hacker NewsExactly. This is such a silly argument. The article takes the argument "if a lot of jobs disappeared since they are now done effectively for free, what about tax revenue??"
It really misses the forrest from the trees. You're transported into a world in which efficiencies mean that much fewer people need to work, but somehow government services and entitlements are unchanged and we need to hit roughly the same percent federal tax receipts or ... what exactly?
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- social security
- healthcare
- armed forces
- road/utility maintenance
bacially everything funded by taxes
Or...infrastructure, public services and schools go unmaintained? How about the magic technology supposedly allowing for all of this efficency, all the while it imagines a human has six fingers, who will maintain that?
Also, if magical robot AI makes private operations more efficient, requiring less cost for the same or more amount, then it can do the same thing for government operations.
> You're transported into a world in which efficiencies mean that much fewer people need to work,
It's a matter of perspective. I'm pretty sure that from their perspective those people very much need to work because they need to pay taxes, rent, insurance, food etc...
What mechanism is going to ensure that the increased productivity is going to result in lower cost of living for these people such that they no longer require to spend so much of their life working to survive?
Or people starve?
But ok look at it this way... What is silly about taxing a sector that is undertaxed because the current system assumed income taxes?