It may sound callous to cheer these advances, but cheer we must. Technological advances can lower the price, and improve the quality or availability, of everything from that can of Budweiser to a life-saving medical procedure.

Only through productivity-enhancing technological improvement can we increase our standard of living. Why are we many times more prosperous than Americans of a century ago? It’s the cumulative effect of thousands of advances, including elevators that didn’t need operators, computers that eliminated legions of clerical jobs and shipping containers that could be moved by giant cranes rather than muscular dockhands.

If we had taxed those technologies to protect the elevator operators, clerks and dockhands, we’d be poorer today. When you tax something, you get less of it.

“A robot tax doesn’t make economic sense,” says Rik Hafer, a Lindenwood University economist. “If you put a deterrent on creating new technology, it slows the growth of overall output.”

The techno-pessimists fail to see that robots create jobs, too. The most obvious way is that they create jobs for the engineers and programmers who make the robots work.