Apologies for the lenght of this reply, but it's a complex topic. Tech optimists offer panaceas that even I can pick apart, so let me preface what I'm saying by stating that I don't want to be right, so if you can offer *coherent* counters to the points I make below, I will very happy indeed...



As an (old) programmer, my default stance was one of tech-optimism for decades - but I have been dragged kicking and screaming into the pessimist camp in the last few years, for the simple reason that for most pan-out scenarios, I cannot find anyone who can offer optimistic answers that hang together.



Over the last few years, the "standard" answers of the tech optimists to the impending automation-driven unemployment tsunami mostly fall into these catagories:

- Universal Basic Income

- Taxing "Robots" (software and automation)

- Taxing the Tech Giants



I will try and illustate why *none* of these are realistic.



UBI doesn't work - and it's not just because of the surface reasons of affordability. Don't get me wrong, I would love UBI to be feasible - without that hundreds of millions of poor in Africa and countries like India are heading for catastrophe in as little as a decade. The basic problem is that the tax-take of governments is going to drop like a stone as automation starts to kick in. People who are not working don't generate tax for governments to gather and redistribute. For UBI to work, governments would ultimately have to take over the means of production of goods and services as automation starts to swallow profession after profession - and you can only do that if you have ownership and control of the tech - without that governments can distribute diddly-squat. And the problem with that is, only a few dozen leviathan tech corps (mostly in the US, a handful in Asia and Europe) own that high-end tech. And they ain't going to just hand it over, not even to the US government, much less governments in Europe and elsewhere. The only way for any nation to get there is to innovate that same tech that the tech giants have created, and own the IP for. But you now face the problem posed by asking why only a handful of countries in the world have rocket science or nukes: it's the same reason why most countries are going to find UBI unfeasible. Implementing something like Driverless is more complex than launching rockets. If all this tech was so easy, then there would already be a hell of a lot more competitors to Alphabet, MSTF, FB, and all the countries in the world would already have nukes and rocket science - but it isn't and they don't.



Taxing robots - and the immediate problem you face is detecting which work was done by humans and which by software, in order to tax them differently. Software is not even locatable in one place; you're not even going to be able to pin down what it does or know where it is (in the clouds mate, cirrus, stratus, that type of thing, or even running on satellites to avoid jurisdiction restrcitions), to come even close to taxing the work it does. You can tax the final transaction, but that leaves the problem intact - it doesn't generate the money you need to feed the people who's jobs were displaced by the software. To give just one illustration of what I'm talking about, what do you propose governments do with adaptive AI like IBM Watson? Tax every copy like a person, tax deducted at source every month? And IBM Watson learns as it goes along, so if it does the work of one person today, it might be doing the work of a hundred in a years time - how do you even measure, let alone tax all that? More fundamentally, in extremis, all that is required to create world-altering code is a single person with a laptop - witness Bitcoin. How do you control any of that?. Come to that, how would you tax the creators of Bitcoin?



Taxing the Tech Giants - These entities are already rather like the East-India Company - almost nation states (but without the geography) masquerading in the shell of corporations. Pretty much the last point at which they can be bought under regulatory control is *now*, and only the US can do that - if it doesn't, the EU certainly can't. Anyone under the illusion that governments or regulatory bodies will be able to control the tech leviathans, needs to just to consider the recent EU "fine" on Google and ask the question: what happens when we eventually have a face-off, and Google or any one of the tech giants tells the EU or any other government: no, we are not paying your fine, do your worst. What would the EU do - shut down all Google servers in Europe? And replace them with what? Or ban Word and Excel across the continent, because Microsoft refuse to open it's tech for inspection? It becomes obvious that soon (~5 years) governments won't be able to compel the tech giants to do anything, including challenge the mechanisms they employ to avoid paying tax, they will be that entrenched and that far ahead.



There is one more suggestion people occasionally throw my way in debate - A Global Unitary Authority, effectively a single global government. I can see that something like this might emerge after a couple of decades of chaos, but I would bet my bottom dollar such a thing would be authoritarian. A dystopia beckons.