Because the benefits of automation are highly capital intensive, concentrating wealth in ways that are bad. Taxing this make the benefits for those with capital less, but it probably still means automation is a great investment.
This tax just prices in the negative externalities of job-loss into automation. Job-loss really is a drag on an economy (you need consumers to keep an economy going). Moreover job-loss causes poverty, and poverty is bad in and of itself. UBI should make poverty less bad. Funding that partially by automation makes sense if that automation is partially the cause of the poverty (through job loss).
On one hand, you say that fewer people working reduces the pie. On the other hand, you say we should encourage automation. What situation would enable full automation and enable 100% workforce participation?
I'm not a luddite. I think that automation is good, but I don't think that it makes humans permanently redundant. The human skill set is too diverse. Automation should be encouraged, not taxed, because it makes society wealthier and more productive.
"I think that automation is good, but I don't think that it makes humans permanently redundant."
Technology has already made people permanently redundant in many places and will continue to do so. There is a near zero percent chance that technology will stop advancing to replace people's jobs. As we march forward with new automation, there will be a net loss in jobs. UBI is an attempt to solve that problem.
Examples of permanent redundancy are tricky to see, because even when people don’t really do a job anymore at a large scale, there are still humans involved, just way, way fewer. Examples are:
Computers - not microprocessors but “computers” which were people who did the work of calculating stuff before calculators were invented.
Lumberjacks - we have logging equipment now.
Musicians - we have DJs and radio to provide us music.
Yes those are examples of technology, but there aren't vast swaths of homeless lumberjacks and mathematicians. Humans are remarkably adept at learning new skills when previous tasks have been automated.
Traffic lights eliminated the jobs of police officers standing in the middle of the road with a whistle. That policeman didn't become homeless. He got reassigned to a more productive role or found a new employer.
I actually agree with you on this if taxation is framed as a way to discourage something. But the goal is to encourage automation but ensure it benefits society, not just a wealthy few, so…
> because it makes society wealthier and more productive.
It does not. It makes some people ridiculously wealthy and makes everyone else poorer.
Would you say that the tractor for instance has only made John Deere wealthy, or has it made the world better off?
Has the motor vehicle only improved the life of the Ford family or would I be better off with a horse and carriage?
Have personal computers only made Bill Gates and Michael Dell richer or have they benefited the human race as a whole?
All of these are examples of automating laborious processes. All of them have made inventors wealthy and the world a nicer place to live. The economy isn't zero sum where to make one person richer another must necessarily become poorer.
You are correct that the economy is not zero sum. It is not black and white, but the primary beneficiaries of automation are those who have the investment capital to leverage automation at scale. The rest get a better world sometimes, but our benefits pale in comparison.
Humans and automation coexist. It's not as if all the engineers that used slide-rules and graphing paper went homeless when AutoCAD was invented. Same with farmers and the tractor. Society gets richer as automation makes our labor more efficient.
I'm an automation engineer. Automation and labor are at odds. Yeah, automation doesn't completely eliminate jobs, but it takes a lot fewer people to do those jobs. As per your example with farmers and the tractor, agriculture went from employing 90% of people to <2%, most of whom are doing tasks which are generally resistant to automation. You do not find humans guiding horse-drawn plows right alongside the tractors, both coexisting in harmony; the horse population plummeted as they were rendered obsolete and the humans have moved onto other things.
The main impediment to automation is the ready availability of cheap labor. Automation requires large upfront investments and lots of technical skill on the part of management. A highschool dropout has no upfront cost and responds to voice commands. I can say from personal experience, even when automation will easily pay for itself in a few months, there is generally still huge resistance to making that investment.
Throughout history you will find that many civilizations such as Rome or China had the opportunity to industrialize but didn't because labor was abundant. It is when there is a shortage of labor, such as after the black death, that moneyed interests are forced to invest in making their assets more productive. By paying people not to work (or more accurately not to work the undesirable jobs which ought to be automated) you get the same incentive to automate that a massive plague would induce, but without the tens of millions dead.
But you're proving my point here. 90% was pushed out of farming, but that population isn't unemployed right now. We're doing other things, like being automation engineers.
And as we automate other things, life will continue to improve, but humans won't ever run out of things to do.
People weren't pushed out of farming, people abandoned farming. The large investments in mechanization were made after migration to cities made it increasingly difficult to find low wage workers to tend farms. The automation wound up being much better than the humans it replaced, allowing agricultural productivity to skyrocket even as its labor force plummeted, but despite being the biggest beneficiaries, the farm owners had spent decades resisting these improvements. The average time from when a new farm mechanization was invented to when it started being commercially adopted was about 30 years. Progress begins with change.
No one is arguing that humans are at risk of running out of things to do, nor is that at all relevant to a discussion of UBI. No one is going to leave a fulfilling and rewarding job to live around the poverty level on UBI, UBI is about getting people out of the low paying, menial work that should have already been automated were it not for the glut of cheaply available labor, the jobs people only take because they will starve to death if they don't. The moment you take away the risk of starving to death, these people can do things besides burn away their hours - they can learn new skills, move to areas with more opportunities, or maybe just work on themselves, and then opportunities which were previously out of reach become available. Not everyone will necessarily find something better to do, but whereas under our current system these people would clog up the gears of progress by continuing to work automatable jobs, with UBI they are taken care of while society advances.
Note that UBI should not be 'paying people not to work'. It is paying people regardless of whether they work. The key to UBI being succesful (imho) is that everyone gets it and everyone gets the same amount (maybe excepting people under 18?). This makes the system so much simpler to administer.
It also prevents weird traps where doing something unintentionally costs you your UBI. (e.g. people who start working and earn too much to qualify for food-stamps / benefits / some other program, thus having them end up with less money each month).
