Stephen Hawking Demands Robot Wealth Redistribution

Stephen Hawking jumped the shark a while back. Since then he's been slowly going nuts in public. Before it was the AI threat. Now it's robot wealth redistribution.

Physicist Stephen Hawking, though, seems to have suddenly discovered something more worrisome than robots.

Last year, he was concerned that humans were evolving so slowly that artificial intelligence might walk all over us. On Thursday, however, he found a more immediate concern.

In a Reddit Ask Me Anything session, Hawking offered a new disturbance in an answer to a long question about technological unemployment.

"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed," he wrote. "Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution."

Some might almost see this as a hope for technological socialism. However, Hawking observed: "So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."

"Shorter Stephen Hawking: 'For hundreds of years, people who claimed that machines reduce jobs have looked silly. But I'll be different!'" tweeted venture capitalist Marc Andreesen.

Andreesen went on to suggest that "someone buy Stephen Hawking an Economics 101 textbook please."

Machines already produce most of everything we need. And we produce the machines. Distribution is always going to be defined by production. More machines are not going to make a welfare state possible. And a life of "luxurious leisure" would be ruinous for much of the population.

Technology reduces the need for human labor. But the work just moves to labor that is still human controlled. Machines still need to designed, assembled and maintained. Programs still need a human hand on the keyboard. The work just requires fewer people. The unemployment s is real, but that's because we're not making the best use of human resources. 

Machine-owners are the people who invest money into new equipment and technology. Redistributing the wealth from them makes it less likely that there'll be more of that stuff coming along.

If you own a computer and you automatically bid on eBay auctions, you're one of those dreaded "machine owners". Should your wealth be redistributed?

But let's imagine Hawking's utopia. It's one where everybody gets a huge government check every month without ever having to work while machines maintain and invent themselves and do everything. These machines are smart enough to replace every human being in the chain, without ever wanting anything for themselves.

This is a slave owner's fantasy economy and it's telling that this is the only kind of arrangement in which wealth redistribution makes any kind of sense.