Let robots make us an offer we can’t refuse, for us to allow them to supplant us; perhaps a Universal Basic Income?

Sir, Simon Kuper writes about “How to cope when robots take your job” October 9.

Before I got censored, there too, in 2012, in an Op-Ed in Venezuela titled “We need worthy and decent unemployments” I wrote: “What politician does not speak up for the need to create decent and well paid jobs for young people? But, if that's not possible, and the economy is not able to deliver that on its own ... What on earth are we to do?” 

And I followed that up with “The power of a nation, and the productivity of its economy, which so far has depended primarily on the quality of its employees may, in the future, also depend on the quality of its unemployed, as a minimum in the sense of these not interrupting those working.”

And so perhaps not only journalists but all other who end up unemployed because of robots too, should require those employing robots to pay a out a Universal Basic Income, as a quid-pro-quo for us allowing these to supplant us. Or if they have better ideas, let the robots themselves make us an offer we can’t refuse.

Ideally that could allow many to operate on the fringe margins of earnings, allowing them to keep busy with what they most like to do.

For journalists the alternative could be to get really creative so as to obtain some ad income from a story that goes viral. Sadly, in that case, the temptations of sacrificing truth in order to gain virality might prove to hard to resist… as we already see happening more and more, here and there and everywhere.

PS. Look at it this way. If robots send us into early retirement, should not robots pay taxes too? Should not the employers of robots have to pay payroll taxes for these? That could help to fund our Universal Basic Income. And that could also help us humans to compete with the robots for jobs on a more level playing ground. 

PS. A Universal Basic Income is a step-ladder that will allow us to reach up easier to the gig-economy.

PS. If then taxing robots funds our living by means of a Universal Basic Income, could we all become a robots owning gentry,  reading and writing poetry like Jane Austen’s landed gentry?

PS. Where does Donald Trump suggest we build the wall against the robots who threaten American jobs, and who is going to pay for it?

P.S. How many jobs have robots taken from humans only because robots are not subject to minimum wages and payroll taxes?

PS. Soon unemployed PhD’s will not even be able to drive taxis in New York, as driverless cars will be deemed safer.

PS. I have been concerned with growing structural unemployment for a long time, like to the point of suggesting It's time to just scratch each other's backs.

PS. By the way, in all statistics on employment, where can we find information on how many robots gained employment, for instance in the USA during the last quarter of 2016?

PS. When playing the employment game, humans & robots face same par salary, but robots count with extra payroll tax handicap strokes

PS. Grandparents, can you imagine the horrors if your grandchildren come to depend on dumb artificial intelligence and on 3rd class robots?

PS. I anställning spelet, har både mänskor och robotar samma par lön, men robotar har 31,34% extra arbetsgivaravgift slag.

PS. Here some disorderly lose cannon questions about life in the just around the corner Robot/Automation La-La-Land

PS. Dwindling workforces puts the International Labour Organization (ILO) at a crossroad: To unionize unemployed or robots?

PS. At what rate should we tax robots? A very high one in order to make us humans more competitive, or a fairly low one to allow robots to do as much heavy lifting as possible for us in our economy?

@PerKurowski ©

Instead of labor and capital struggling against each other, perhaps they should discuss what to do with their intermediaries

“The real disaster lies in youth unemployment” writes John Plender in “Recession has revived labour´s struggle against capital” January 11.

And there is no doubt he is right about it and there is no doubt we have no chance of solving it while we have bank regulators who insist on that “unexpected losses”, those for which they require banks to have capital, are higher for the “risky” than for the “safe”.

Because, by means of Basel´s risk-weights, this translates into the banks being able to earn much higher risk-adjusted returns on equity when they lend to the “safe”, than when they lend to the “risky”.

And that translates of course into that banks will not any longer lend to finance the “riskier” future as much as previous generations of banks did.

And Plender writes: “The real driver of income inequality over the past decade has been top pay – specifically, of chief executives and bankers” and I ask. Could the bonuses of bankers have been as high as they were if bank capital has been required to be as much as it used to be pre-risk weighting days? No way!

And so instead of labour and capital struggling against each other, perhaps they should discuss what to do with the intermediaries… whether these are executives, regulators or politicians.

I mean, do not those who receive low salaries have a lot in common with those who receive low interest rates on their savings?