Ned Ludd is dead
The neo-Luddites are the bot masters, and they aren't making a dent in the advance of the solid state society.
Yes, it would be nice for companies to wake up a bit to the fact that society is stable only as long as the underclass (99% of us) are fed and employed. We don't riot, we don't set fire to their houses and pull them out for a lynching. (The Rodney King - Los Angeles riots were 25 years ago, and nobody was starving. I'm guessing you'd need to be at least 30 years old to maybe have a direct memory of them.)
What would a robot tax accomplish? Would it actually result in more human employment? Usually taxes are regarded as necessary overhead, and if the taxes are too onerous, then companies move their production elsewhere. Once a factory of robots is set up in a country where the parent company won't be bothered, don't expect them to come back and hire workers in first world nations.
Imagine that a neo-Luddite writes software to brick the robots. So there's some down time, the robots and network gets hardened, and everything goes back to being productive. That means there's no effect in the long term.
It has been proven that software can write software. Just give it a business case, and libraries are cobbled together in short order. The field will widen, until one day most software will be written by other software. It will be tested by software. It will be marketed by software.
Back in the 1930s there was the Work Projects Administration, along with the Federal Project Number One for skilled people. Would something similar be a solution for this? I have no idea, but I do know it would take more money that the government has.
But to keep my brains from rotting, I'm contributing to open source projects, and doing my best to keep myself up-to-date. It's a hedge against what may come, but we don't need to have a rise-of-the-machines to being on the receiving end of discrimination.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
