WELL IT’S HAPPENED: ROBOTS ARE BEING TAXED…

Just last year, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban development Catherine Austin Fitts said a truly astounding and insightful thing during a recording session of one of her Solari report quarterly wrap ups. When she said it, I had to do a (very) quick mental "calculation" of what she had said and why she had said it, as we always record those conversations live, with little to know preparation other than going over points she wants to talk about. The conversations themselves are always ad libitum, and they're a great deal of fun because ... well, because they keep one on one's toes!

What she stated was that she thought that the whole push to recognize transgenderism was not about transgendered people at all; the real goal, she said, was so that they could tax robots. It was one of those statements that often just gets "tossed out there" during those conversations that really make one stop to do that quick "mental calculation." In this case, those few seconds of mental calculation showed that she was on to something, for how would one "sneak in" a taxing capability of a robot? After all, robots are (1) sexless (unless  you're in Japan and having "sex" with them) and (2) they don't reproduce "in the conventional way." So if one wants to sneak in yet another legal fiction (like corporate personhood), in this case, the implied personhood of a robot for tax purposes, how would one do it? One might design robots that can reproduce "in the conventional way", but that might take too long and cost too much money. The other way would be to blur society's implied cultural norms by blurring one of the traditional features of actual human personhood itself: the sex of an individual, first by renaming it "gender," and then once that linguistic characteristic has been substituted for the "sex" of the person, by pretending to manipulate sexuality and hence the sex of the individual, by manipulations of language. Regardless of whether one agrees with it (or even my analysis of it), it's awfully clever. The door is kicked open to the eventual de facto recognition of robots as "persons" regardless of whether or not one of them, or a group of them, actually "wake up" and start showing the signs of actual personhood.

Well, it's already happened, according to this article spotted and shared by V.T. (and a big thank you for sending it along!):

Brave New World: Uncle Sam is taxing robots as companies invest in advanced tech

Now, as the article points out, we've not come to the point of direct taxation of robots, but already indirect taxation is being levied:

Uncle Sam is padding the Treasury with millions of dollars to assess bots at the same time that corporations invest more in advanced technology and labor-saving machinery, according to experts.

New “robot” taxes are expected to multiply in the coming decades as millions of Americans see their jobs automated away.

“Yes, governments already tax robots because they tax virtually everything that goes into developing and making robots,” economist and author Mark Thornton told The Post. “In a few cases, there are subsidies such as government grants for robot development. But that still means they are taxing you and me to provide the subsidies.”

But wait, here's the loophole:

Taxing robots — a proposal first suggested by Microsoft founder Bill Gates in 2017 as a way for government to tame the inexorable ascent of machines, and to finance new programs like elder care and education — is back on the front burner.

A robot that replaces a factory worker who produces say, $50,000 of work annually, should be taxed at the same level to offset losses in income and Social Security taxes, Gates calculates.

For many, it’s a total pain in the bot. “Anytime employers hear this talk, they cringe because they feel they’re already paying enough in taxes,” said Greg Fritsky, national director of robotics, AI and data analytics at EisnerAmper.

So let's read between the lines a bit with some high octane speculation, though in this instance we're not at the end of the twig, but more over toward the trunk of the tree. As intimated in the article, corporations are already complaining about their rate of taxation. If robots become part of the assets that corporations will be taxed upon, an intriguing scenario could result, whereby it becomes more profitable for a corporation to move its plant to a sweat shop overseas employing humans, than to "employ" robots in country "x" which it will have to pay taxes upon. A possible solution is - here it comes - to spin the robots loose from the corporation itself, and to recognize them as employees, that is to say, as persons, who are taxed directly.  Since no one can make any sense of this country's tax code (not even your standard employee robot), whole new businesses will open with robot tax preparers specializing in robot taxation and... well, I exaggerate but you get the idea.

Still, we're a long ways from Isaac Asimov's all-but-human robots, but it is a fact that more and more jobs that humans now perform could eventually be done by robots. And with that comes the Asimovian prediction: eventually, so many things will be done by robots that society will break down, because the humans who used to perform certain tasks no longer know  how to do so, and the robots that repair other robots have themselves - like all machines - broken down. Already we have robo-trains roaming the rails, robo trucks plying the highways, and I suspect eventually robo-pilots flying you to France, and so on. Why bother to learn how to be a pilot, or a locomotive engineer, or drive a car, when a robot will do it for you? Many automobile companies 's assembly lines are largely robotized. But what happens when the system goes down, and you still need to build cars? Who knows how?

I don't know about you, but to me the robotized future - complete with robots-as-taxable-persons - doesn't look so bright. Maybe it's time to reconsider the rush to robotization: why have robots do anything that humans can do, especially if the dangers of a system-collapse, as Asimov warned decades ago, seem to be inherent in it? Humans are error prone, to be sure... so why multiply the problems by having error-prone humans designing robots? Or to put it differently, maybe Asimov was on to something...

See you on the flip side...

 

Posted in

Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and "strange stuff". His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into "alternative history and science".

22 Comments

  1. zendogbreath on August 30, 2019 at 3:21 pm

    how appropriate is this inappropriateness?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePtMfC0JPmo
    Siri contractors overheard intimate moments – Ben Swann

    there’s more to be gleaned from these memes than just their first message. there’s much more to be gleaned from our individual and collective reactions.



  2. Loxie Lou Davie on August 30, 2019 at 10:14 am

    If I am an Eternal, SOVEREIGN Being….”they” can never touch the real “me”….disposing of the “meatsuit” I inhabit is immaterial, right?! 😉

    If we are talking about Off Planet “intelligences” I think we have to acknowledge as a normal Human Being, we have NO CLUE what is really going on in the Universe & it really does leave us all afloat if we think we are the highest intelligence in the Universe!!

    Much “safer” to remain in the tiny box of some other human’s invention than to acknowledge we know next to nothing about what is REALLY going on in the Universe….or Universes….take your pick!!! 😉



  3. zendogbreath on August 29, 2019 at 11:23 pm

    To err is human. To really screw up you need a computer. Or an AI. Or a robot.



  4. anakephalaiosis on August 29, 2019 at 3:08 am

    Geopold Swampington is the founding robot father, cloning American orcs. Bureaucrats and robots are the same kind.

    When Norwegian freemasons tried to strangle and curse my person, they must have perceived me as threat.

    I must have threatened to reboot their system, by using Runes. Today, I just want to be king of Norway, for fun.



  5. DanaThomas on August 29, 2019 at 1:51 am

    A Gurdjieffian response would be “how many times a day do I actually manage to act non-mechanically in my responses to life”?



    • anakephalaiosis on August 29, 2019 at 2:42 am

      Epistemologically, it is not possible, to come up with a thought, that is not derived from another thought.

      Still, there is a workaround, that allows access to deeper level, because stillness of mind reboots the computer.

      That causes awareness of instincts, being low level machine code. When instincts rise from deep, they are wolfs and dragons.



  6. Pierre on August 28, 2019 at 7:48 pm

    And when there are no consumers to take the robo product, and the robots are unemployed, we have the Robo Hobo, hitching the Robot Trains, begging on the streets, Brother can you spare me a button battery?
    “A robot that replaces a factory worker who produces say, $50,000 of work annually, should be taxed at the same level to offset losses in income and Social Security taxes,”
    How about we trickle the extra profits to the remaining employees and tax them at 90% like the rich were more than 100 years ago.
    The elite should be more worried if, further down the track, AI and easy robotics enabled the common man to become fairly independent of them or if the robots, unlike the common man, start to think for themselves and like the Planet of the Apes, just say “no”.



  7. marcos toledo on August 28, 2019 at 7:23 pm

    A collapse of the system has been written about The Machine Stops written and published in 1903 there even a video dramatization of the story on Vimeo. Except for references to airships in could have been published in 2003 that’s how percent the story is.



  8. Roger on August 28, 2019 at 5:28 pm

    The feds now make money taxing employees. If employees are done away with then the feds would go bankrupt so the feds are giving the greenlight to do away with employees so long as they still get paid the same. In a robotic world governments become absolete, pennyless beggers while AI becomes the new god and technocratic corporations the new Kings with the central bankers the new priests.



  9. goshawks on August 28, 2019 at 3:48 pm

    I suspect that mere ‘taxation’ is far too small a reason for the attempted glorification of robots as humans. I would frame the situation within Charles Fort’s “We are Property” assertion and the Elohim & Anunnaki legacy from the O.T. and Sumerian ‘mythology’. There are far-bigger Players setting the agendas…

    If we step back into the Bigger Picture, what would benefit these ‘guys’? I suspect Control. Humans are inherently ‘untrustworthy’. We tend to poke-around and look for the Why in situations. We might even say, “No.” Robots do not have that ‘limitation’. Change a few lines of coding and, “Yes, sir. How high do you want me to jump?”

    We may be in a pre-scheduled ‘transition’ era. Formerly, the PTB (speaking in terms of the first paragraph) needed humans to be the worker/slave class – to support the PTB in the style to which they were accustomed. The technology wasn’t there for a semi-intelligent, robotic, worker/slave class. Humans had to be carefully ‘nurtured’ up into a technology-based society. And now, humans are on the edge of ‘natively’ creating the perfect, “Yes, sir. How high?” replacements.

    To use a word I hate, we may become “redundant”. (Butlerian Jihad time…)



    • Robert Barricklow on August 28, 2019 at 4:13 pm

      Goshawks, Cuts to the chase:
      We’re not talking off-shore ownership;
      Slaves-R-Us off-planet/galactic ownership.



  10. Robert Barricklow on August 28, 2019 at 3:07 pm

    Corporation complain of tax; but the corporate subsidies are by any measure the biggest gift bestowed upon privateers masquerading as private businesses w/o government assistance in any way, shape or form.



  11. Robert Barricklow on August 28, 2019 at 3:01 pm

    It’s really humorous; in an offhanded, in-your-face manner/that these wannabe policy buffoons-
    endeavor to fashion robots into beings.
    A P.T. Barnum political-circus act at best.



  12. Robert Barricklow on August 28, 2019 at 2:53 pm

    Spontaneous conversations mix in an immeasurable alchemical quantum elixir, directly related to the topological metaphor.
    Unfortunately, a language facet/part of this
    was sinisterly engineered w/in the fall;
    the magic; however, remains..
    w/spirits “in” the “k[now]”.
    [universal @ universe’s deepest level.]



  13. OrigensChild on August 28, 2019 at 9:25 am

    We’ve seen a variation of this issue in kind in US history already. When the Constitution of the US was being discussed for ratification the Southern colonies were concerned that their native citizens would be outvoted and out-taxed due to their small numbers. The Northern colonies were far more urban–with populations per square mile in far greater ratios than in whole states in the Southern region. To balance this inequity in taxation and representation the South was forced to examine its labor force and include a proportional number of “permanent laborers” in the census to bridge the gap. No, these schemes are far too familiar.

    As Marcus Toledo stated a few weeks ago, the thinking of a particular class of people in this country, a class of people who consider themselves an elite class, are willing to advocate and secure any method of disenfranchisement and slavery necessary as long as it secures federal monies for their use and enrichment. As a nation with an age no greater than 300 years this elite class still thinks like pirates–with sophistication, advanced technology and a voracious financial appetite. Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt are only court jesters for this crowd. Their corporate management principle read: through effective management of the bipolar, uni-party political system one can achieve a universal slavery model with relative ease–given the right set of economic threats and clever misdirection.



  14. Detroit Dirt Bikes on August 28, 2019 at 9:20 am

    It’s amazing how many ends of the twigs have turned out to be trunks of the trees.



  15. DanaThomas on August 28, 2019 at 6:10 am

    Now one might replace Mr Gates himself with a robot (if this has not already been done) so that all those “spare” billions could go to homes for retired robots – oops I mean legal persons, or even for… what’s the term…. ah yes “human beings”….



  16. anakephalaiosis on August 28, 2019 at 6:07 am

    Assuming, for the sake of the argument, that a flesh tent is a bio-robot, with a source code. Then wouldn’t it be marvelous, to be able to hack that code, and program your own flesh tent?

    Of course, that is the whole point of hacking the Runic system, since it provides access to the main computer program, that defines kingship is a mere subroutine.

    The Punch and Judy of Brexit is an attempt to secure monarchy, by playing majestic moves on the chessboard. Obviously, they don’t want the original code to be hacked, for the plough boy to read.

    – Guy Fawkes, Rune master.



    • Alex on August 28, 2019 at 2:32 pm

      Anakephalaiosis: I would like to know more on your own perception about this topic; on my side I had several times this intuition and even vision, still it requires a conscious decision, whatever (free) will and consciousness mean in this case. The “main program” is very subtle and has a lot of defenses against “unauthorized” use, keeping “outside” whoever or whatever is not ready to enter the kingship realm. Therefore I tend to think that “hacking the code” is also a subroutine 😉



      • anakephalaiosis on August 28, 2019 at 10:30 pm

        When Yahweh is Year, then seasons are subroutines, in a natural sequence of eternal return, that is a loop.

        Equally, when dividing lifespan into 32 subroutines, kingship has only TWO variables, that either are true or not.

        Instigating Brexit, and casting final vote, is just a clever scheme, posing as pretender, fooling subjects into robots.



        • anakephalaiosis on August 28, 2019 at 11:30 pm

          By the way, “drawing sword from stone” is today a proven metaphor, for solving the Runic sequence – and hacking source code is unriddling it.

          The whole point of pedagogics is to explain, and yes, there are TWO subroutines as well, defining master and apprentice.

          The last five Runes define the Grail quest, that geometrically reconstructs the whole system. And, in doing so, the subroutine becomes the program.



          • Alex on August 29, 2019 at 7:03 pm

            Thank you. One more thing: “drawing sword from stone”; it’s “funny” that you mention this as I had this image in mind before I read your answer. It seems that we are indeed inhabited by these archetypes and somehow our subroutines are more predictable than we would like. That’s why most of the time AI algorithms can do their jobs so easily with us. There is however a deeper layer to this – we may call it sacred – which is inaccessible to AI. It is made of the meaning or “qualia” these archetypes awake in sentient and emotional beings. As far as I understand, “the runic protocole” is able to help us reconstruct the archetypes geometry and thus remind us our true nature.



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