From Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist):
What shall we do when the robots take our jobs? Last week’s column
discussed mass technological unemployment, and readers were quick to
write in with variants on the same common sense suggestion: tax the
robots.
“Give a robot a deemed income equivalent to the wage of the human it
is replacing, with a default of the average income,” wrote one. A
similar suggestion: “If one robot displaced five people earning a modest
£20,000 each, then that robot could be said to have an economic value
of £100,000 per annum.” Both correspondents proposed an income tax or
similar levy on this robot-generated output.
I’m grateful for all constructive comments, but particularly grateful
for these because I think they are wrong in a fascinating and
instructive way. The fault is mine: I set a trap every time I talk about
“robots” and “jobs”. That is not how automation happens.
Consider an idea dreamt up in 1978, released in October 1979, and so revolutionary that the journalist Steven Levy could write
just five years later: “There are corporate executives, wholesalers,
retailers, and small business owners who talk about their business lives
in two time periods: before and after the electronic spreadsheet.”
Spreadsheet software redefined what it meant to be an accountant.
Spreadsheets were once a literal thing: two-page spreads in a paper
ledger. Fill them in, and make sure all the rows and columns add up. The
output of several spreadsheets would then be the input for some larger,
master spreadsheet. Making an alteration might require hours of work
with a pencil, eraser, and desk calculator.
Once a computer programmer named Dan Bricklin came up with the idea
of putting the piece of paper inside a computer, it is easy to see why
digital spreadsheets caught on almost overnight.
But did the spreadsheet steal jobs? Yes and no. It certainly put a
sudden end to a particular kind of task — the task of calculating,
filling in, checking and correcting numbers on paper spreadsheets.
National Public Radio’s Planet Money programme concluded
that in the 35 years after Mr Bricklin’s VisiCalc was launched, the US
lost 400,000 jobs for book-keepers and accounting clerks....MORE
