What Does A Robot Accountant Await Like?

From Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist):

What shall nosotros produce when the robots receive got our jobs? Last week’s column discussed volume technological unemployment, together with readers were quick to write inward amongst variants on the same mutual feel suggestion: taxation the robots.

“Give a robot a deemed income equivalent to the wage of the human it is replacing, amongst a default of the average income,” wrote one. Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 similar suggestion: “If i robot displaced 5 people earning a pocket-sized £20,000 each, together with thus that robot could move said to receive got an economical value of £100,000 per annum.” Both correspondents proposed an income taxation or similar levy on this robot-generated output.
I’m grateful for all constructive comments, but specially grateful for these because I scream upward they are incorrect inward a fascinating together with instructive way. The error is mine: I ready a trap every fourth dimension I verbalise nearly “robots” together with “jobs”. That is non how automation happens.

Consider an persuasion dreamt upward inward 1978, released inward Oct 1979, together with thus revolutionary that the journalist Steven Levy could write but 5 years later: “There are corporate executives, wholesalers, retailers, together with little describe concern owners who verbalise nearly their describe concern lives inward 2 fourth dimension periods: earlier together with after the electronic spreadsheet.”

Spreadsheet software redefined what it meant to move an accountant. Spreadsheets were in i lawsuit a literal thing: two-page spreads inward a newspaper ledger. Fill them in, together with brand sure all the rows together with columns add together up. The output of several spreadsheets would together with thus move the input for or thus larger, main spreadsheet. Making an modification mightiness require hours of function amongst a pencil, eraser, together with desk calculator.

Once a computing device programmer named Dan Bricklin came upward amongst the persuasion of putting the slice of newspaper within a computer, it is slow to come across why digital spreadsheets caught on almost overnight.

But did the spreadsheet steal jobs? Yes together with no. It sure as shooting seat a abrupt terminate to a item form of project — the project of calculating, filling in, checking together with correcting numbers on newspaper spreadsheets. National Public Radio’s Planet Money programme concluded that inward the 35 years after Mr Bricklin’s VisiCalc was launched, the U.S.A. lost 400,000 jobs for book-keepers together with accounting clerks....MORE