Ummm, how about use some of the robotax money to get them housing, mental health care, treatment for any addiction issues and retrained to help them become healthy, happy, fulfilled and contributing members of society? And use some more of the taxes to improve the underlying issues that help to cause such problems in the first place?Just an idea. Ayn Rand probably wouldn't approve tho'...
What is the underlying problem? That really friggin smart people are building robots that are better at virtually eveything a person can do than people are? Should we tax those friggin smart people for every advancement they make based on the number of jobs it endangers? Maybe not a bad idea...
Your mixing up two unrelated issues. Most of the homeless don't have jobs to begin with, so endangering jobs isn't directly relevant to the underlying problem. Of course, in the long run it could certainly exacerbate the problem, if massive unemployment leads to more homelessness, but having enough job openings for all able-bodied adults wouldn't necessarily alleviate all drug addiction and mental and physical illness. Taxes could certainly help pay for rehab centers and long-term medical care facilities.
Person 2:Maybe this is the endgame of human evolution. Instead of having 7 billion people, of whom 1% are rich (that's 70 million): perhaps you have a human population of 70 million rich people, and about 7 billion robots? Not so scary if you are one of the 1%. I just don't want to be around during the transition period.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/03/02/150235/robots-wont-just-take-our-jobs----theyll-make-the-rich-even-richer
The transition wouldn't have to be tragically terrible, if we could spread it out a few generations and accomplish it via free sterilizations and birth control and a one-child policy (at least in terms of social expectations, if not law). We could also, for example, tax each child, instead of providing tax breaks.
We all remember our first smart phone.
Google gave me a free motorola / android so I could be one of their officially recommended handymen for my area, since I didn't have a "smart phone" at the time and they developed an app version before the website.
Mine was the IPhone 4. Before that I only had dumb flip phones. I never switched back to the flip phone.
That phone is here on my desk right now. Never got a service plan for it, I just use it at home on wi-fi. For actual on the road phone calls, I use my $20 on ebay water proof shock resistant folds in half flip phone, that has a camera and even a (very slow and inconvenient) web browser built in.
Why? Because it the web browser is there for when I absolutely need it, and the rest of the time it is slow and inconvenient.
I'm not just a luddite for its own sake - my TV has netflix and youtube built in, I run kodi, my car can send me an email or text if I forget to plug it in. But it does not seem that a pocket computer actually makes any one's life better, (or at least, not better enough to compensate for the ways it makes it worse)
I had bought five desktop computers for home use and about six laptops before buying a tablet. I'll never buy a computer again either. Smart phones and tablets will do everything I need a computer to do.
We have a tablet too. I rarely use it, because it doesn't do a lot of things my (much older!) computer can do, and those it can it doesn't do as well. The computer is faster, has way more software options, and easier to type on keyboard, a 10x bigger screen, infinitely better speakers, a CD/DVD drive, card readers, ethernet port, 7 USB ports - no matter how good tablets and pocket computers get, they will never be able to do certain things as well, by nature of their size.
The roads are nearly empty at night. That is when to haul freight. Don't have trucks on the road at all during the morning and afternoon rush hours.
Actually, a lot of freight IS moved at night. Truck drivers get paid by the mile, not by the hour, and they have a limited number of hours they can drive each day. So many, probably most, long haul truckers make a point to avoid cities in the day time, and drive at off-peak hours as much as possible. What you see in the day are mostly short-haul runs, which have no choice but to deliver to businesses when those businesses are actually open.
Passive income. With the oncoming AI revolution, wouldn't smart people be saving up passive income?
Um, isn't that already true, robots or no robot? Isn't that the whole point of the entire MMM thing?