Thursday, June 23, 2016

Reuters — Europe's robots to become 'electronic persons' under draft plan

Europe's growing army of robot workers could be classed as "electronic persons" and their owners liable to paying social security for them if the European Union adopts a draft plan to address the realities of a new industrial revolution.…
The report added that robotics and artificial intelligence may result in a large part of the work now done by humans being taken over by robots, raising concerns about the future of employment and the viability of social security systems.
The draft motion, drawn up by the European parliament's committee on legal affairs also said organizations should have to declare savings they made in social security contributions by using robotics instead of people, for tax purposes.
Needless to say, capital is vehemently opposed to this.

Reuters
Europe's robots to become 'electronic persons' under draft plan
Georgina Prodhan

15 comments:

Peter Pan said...

Unnecessary bureaucracy. There are other methods of obtaining data on the effect of automation on the labour force.
Maybe they should replace idiot Eurocrats with robots.

Andrew Anderson said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Andrew Anderson said...

Needless to say, capital is vehemently opposed to this. Tom Hickey

Which raises the question of how did capital and labor become so distinct in the first place?

Certainly government subsidies for private credit creation are at least partially to blame, probably largely to blame.

Andrew Anderson said...

Unnecessary bureaucracy. Bob

Jobs, Bob. Aren't they the goal of MMT'ers? Wage slavery for everyone but the rich?

Ryan Harris said...

Important because with identity comes taxes. If robots can be taxed like workers, then humans may no longer at a disadvantage relative to the robots in terms of taxation.

Andrew Anderson said...

then humans may no longer at a disadvantage relative to the robots in terms of taxation.
Ryan Harris

Sounds like a form of Ludditeism.

Justice would be a lot more elegant than kludges to an unjust system.

Peter Pan said...

Taxes would discourage automation, which does sound luddite-tic

Brian Romanchuk said...

How do they define a robot? For example, if we have two existing robots and mount them on a single metal plate, is it one robot or two? We can't count CPU's, since robots could have a number of specialised embedded controllers.

Sigh.

Ignacio said...

This is a loophole mess, I guess it will create additional work for consultants on how to most efficiently bypass those stupid laws...

Matt Franko said...

Brian they will only tax the ones where if they go into the business and they see one that looks like the robot from Lost in Space

Ryan Harris said...

Lawyers excel at vague language. Defining robot, a breeze.

Ignacio said...

Well, we need to keep creating bullshit jobs, the world needs to continue growing this set larges and larger until it's 99% of the jobs.

Otherwise the system would collapse, you know, the monster of "credentialism" has to be feed to keep our Kafkian society rolling.

More laws, more lawyers, more bureaucrats, consultants, politicians and people extracting rents on useless and worthless negative value added jobs. We need this to offset our robotic overlords, because coming with sane ideas is too hard.

It all is Luddite-lite yes... The sucker is born every second, we may be approaching peak-stupidity here on planet Earth.

Ryan Harris said...

Important because with identity comes taxes. If robots can be taxed like workers, then humans may no longer at a disadvantage relative to the robots in terms of taxation.

Jeff65 said...

Robots aren't the problem. The problem is the distribution of efficiency gains from robots. The laws today allow the owners of robots to claim nearly all of it. Putting aside the question of fairness, it is certain to be unsustainable.

Andrew Anderson said...

Robots aren't the problem. The problem is the distribution of efficiency gains from robots. Jeff65

Yes, indeed.

An ethical money and credit system would mean that automation would be more broadly owned, having been more broadly financed.

Actually, automation is broadly financed but with legally stolen purchasing power via government subsidized private credit creation.