Our best hope for a decent and affordable adult social care must be minimizing the intermediaries’ takes, whether these are private or public

Sir, Diane Coyle when discussing the possibilities and need for organizing for instance adult social care, and thereto taking advantage of new methods to connect demand and supply and as exemplified by Uber, expresses concern for “the treatment and status of workers in platform public services (although it is not as if these are high-status jobs at present)” “Algorithms can deliver public services, too” December 19.

What’s missing though in that good analysis, is not having contemplating additional tech advances. For example Uber wants to buy self driven cars, in order to get the complications of human drives out of their way, but without realizing that consumers might at one point take direct contact with those cars, in order to get Uber out of the way.

The same will happen for workers in public services, though of course the increased demand for adult social care should help to keep up the demand for many of them. But, even in this case who knows? If you think of yourself as an older person soiled with your own feces, what’s currently is delicate referred to as an “accident”, who would you feel most comfortable with cleaning you, a not too human 1st class robot or a human? 

Sir, the way our generation, and governments have gone on a debt binge, to anticipate current consumption, there will come a time for a reckoning. If we do not find ways to minimize the intermediaries’ take, we will not afford the basic services we need and want.

Of course intermediaries are workers too… and that is why even for them we need to create decent and worthy unemployments.

@PerKurowski

On which road will our grand-grandchildren travel, on those with only driverless cars, with only human drivers, or in mingled ones?

Sir, I refer to Izabella Kaminska’s “Self-driving cars discover the limits of autonomy” March 29.

30 years from now there could be some roads where only driverless cars can travel, other in which only humans drive and some where both humans and driverless cars go. On which one will our grandchildren send their children to school?

As Kaminska hints at, the last one of these would probably be the one road “in which humans and autonomous vehicles will have to interact”.

But, for safety reasons, future parents will probably rather prefer to send their children on the driverless road, than trust the roads in which humans do their not always their best.

I would of course love for my descendants to keep their ability to drive cars. It is, or at least was such an enjoyment for me. But if I was nowadays told to take a horse drawn carriage down the road, I would not really know what to do, but neither I nor humanity would suffer too much from me lacking that piece of know-how.

Sir, as I recently wrote to you I visited a museum in Sweden that impacted me, the Blekinge Museum, not because it was not a museum of times gone by, it was a museum of my times gone by.

And much more dangerous than losing the ability to drive cars would, as I once also wrote you, be the “diminishing human fighting spirit” that the use of drones and robots could cause.

@PerKurowski

When will an Artificial Intelligence Agent declare humans too dangerous drivers and too dumb emission measurers?

Sir, I refer your “From diesel emissions to omitting the driver” January 15.

It is clear, not withstanding only one side will pay for it, that in the case of the failed carbon emission controls, both the measured and the measurers are to blame. Any regulation, if it fails in any shape or form, should bring on some consequences for the regulators… let us say a 50% salary reduction.

As is, just look at the case of bank regulators, those who set risk weights of 20% for what is AAA-rated, and 150% for what is below BB- rated. That evidenced they had (have) no clue about what they were doing; and so they caused the AAA rated securities backed with mortgages to the subprime sector crisis. But they are still going to Davos, flying business class the least, to lecture the world on what to do. 

It is also clear that one of the biggest challenges for the safety of driverless cars is that these might also encounter human drivers on the road. So either is the driverless-cars equipped with software that handles human-driving whims, or, sooner or later, some Artificial Intelligence Agent will take us humans off the road. Is that good or bad?

My answer to that question goes somewhat along this line. If absolutely all humanity is taken off the road, and so we all lose entirely the abilities needed to drive, so be it. But, if some humans were still allowed to drive, why would I want those to be somebody else’s grandchildren and not mine? 

PS. About driverless cars, the issue of how to tax these, so as not to lose out on the taxes we currently collect, for instance from PhDs driving taxes in New York, is also pending.

@PerKurowski

Higher import tariffs and minimum wages are superb news… for robot manufacturers

Sir, Richard Waters writes: “Pace of automation will depend on how easily workers are displaced” January 13.

And that partly depends on how much robot, driverless cars and similar automation options, will lobby the governments for higher import tariffs and higher minimum wages.

Or on if we will impose some payroll and minimum wage taxes on these, in order for the humans to compete on a more level playing field.

PS. http://teawithft.blogspot.com/2016/10/let-robots-make-us-offer-we-cant-refuse.html

@PerKurowski

According to FT’s research, how much do minimum wages and absence of payroll taxes favour robots?

Sir, Vanessa Houlder writes: “When you book an Airbnb room in London, around a third of the $100 saving you make over the price of an average hotel room is due to tax advantages which favour Airbnb’s business model, according to research by the Financial Times” “Airbnb makes most of legal wiggle room to beat hotels” January 3.

Houlder goes on with: “Research from Morgan reported a higher than expected “cannibalisation of traditional hotels” over the past year, citing survey findings that 49 per cent of Airbnb users in the US, UK, France, and Germany had replaced a hotel stay with a stay booked through the online group.”

Indeed, since it is a human owner of an apartment eating up the opportunity from a human owner of a hotel room, it could be described as “cannibalization”. But, how should we describe when for instance a robot or a driverless car takes away a job opportunity from humans? If, for instance, that happens only because of minimum wages and absence of payroll taxes, is that more like human-offerings at the altar of automation and technology?

@PerKurowski

The worst we could do, is to treat a structural unemployment as a temporal one.

Sir, Gillian Tett writes: “If there is one thing on which almost all economists agree, it is that digital technologies are performing many jobs once done by humans… [and so there’s an] urgent need for a bigger policy debate about how to prepare workers for this new world”, “How robots make humans indispensable”, December 23.

Absolutely, but in this respect, if we face structural and not temporal unemployment then, as I wrote in an Op-Ed in 2012, “We need worthy and decent unemployments”.

For that we must rid ourselves of the negative bias that current unemployment benefits carry. The best alternative in town seems to be a Universal Basic Income, namely the unconditional payout of a fixed amount per month to all citizens, whether unemployed or not. That would help the economy by keeping up consumer demand, and signify a good stepladder for everyone who wants to reach up to a temporary job, a.k.a. a gig job.

How to fund it? There are many alternatives but, in the context of this article, a payroll tax on robots, driverless cars and similar substitutes for humans, seems the way to go, since that would also create a more level playing field when competing for jobs.

Who will be against it? Naturally the redistribution profiteers as that decreases the value of their franchise.

PS. In my homeland I have for decades wanted my nation's net oil revenues to fund such UBI, in this case a variable one, so as to help free us citizens from living under that servitude that 97% of all the nation’s exports going to central government signifies.

PS. In other places UBI and carbon taxes could be a great way to harmonize the incentives for the fight against environmental problems and the fight against inequality.

PS. Ask Trump, what’s worse losing your job opportunity to outsourcing, migrants or robots? If robots, where does he suggest we build the wall and who’s going to pay for it?

@PerKurowski

If Uber drivers are considered workers, are not driverless cars, or robots, workers too, to be taxed accordingly?

Sir, Sarah O’Connor, Jane Croft and Madhumita Murgia report on how “Uber drivers in the UK have won a crucial legal battle with a tribunal ruling they are “workers” entitled to the minimum wage and holiday pay.” “British court rules Uber drivers are ‘workers’ in setback for ‘gig economy’” October 29.

Yes, but if so, why are not those driverless cars that are expected to soon be supplanting all drivers not considered workers too?

Sir, as I have written to you before, if we do not tax what will represent lost work opportunities for humans, something’s going to have to give.

I have nothing against artificial intelligence or robots replacing human workers. That’s great, that will leave us humans much more time to enjoy life. But our non-human replacement workers need to be taxed too; and all those tax revenues re-distributed to all of us humans, by means of Universal Basic Income. That so that we humans will be able to afford enjoying all our additional spare time.

And it is all a case of simple justice. If a company does not employ me because of the payroll taxes I generate for him, should not my robotic substitute be charged with those same taxes?

And a Universal Basic Income would make it so much easier for all us humans to adapt to the gig-economy… we would not have to work 16 hours a day to make a living, perhaps 4 hors would do.

PS. I pray for my grandchildren not having to live surrounded by dumb artificial intelligence and lousy 2nd class robots  

@PerKurowski ©

Currently both bankers and regulators are driving the bank cars simultaneously, using the same instruments and data.

Sir Tim Harford discusses the future of driverless cars in “Pity the robot drivers snarled in a human moral maze” August 2. And he left out some angles that I would have liked him to have explored.

For instance, when he talks of hiccups, human guided cars or computer guided cars accidents would we be talking about the same type of accidents… could not it be foreseeable that a computer glitch resulting accident could cause horrors way beyond what the worst pile up crashes often produced by bad weather conditions do? I mean something like the pile up bank assets crashes caused by having banks following the opinions of only a few credit rating agencies… in this case of agencies that on top of it all are humanly fallible?

And how does Harford´s reference to a person “being so arrogant as to think he could drive without an autopilot”, stand up against the constant badmouthing of bankers who did little but to trust their autopilot installed by their regulators?

But Harford is indeed right on the spot when he ends by mentioning “the question of what we fear and why we fear it remains profoundly, quirkily human” Is not a great example of that the fact that bank regulators who should in all logic fear the most what bankers do not fear, decided to base their fears on exactly the same ex ante perceptions of risks… and concocted their risk-weighted capital requirements?

In fact taking the analogy of driving a car to banking, what we now have is perhaps the worst of all worlds, namely bankers and regulators driving simultaneously using the same instruments and the same data... Can at least somebody please make up his mind about who is in charge, so that it is clear who or what we should blame in case of an accident?