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By this logic owners of wheel barrows should be taxed for all the manual labour jobs the wheel barrow destroyed.
It’s not about logic. It’s about humanity. We are losing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If full AGI dreams are achieved and 80% of jobs disappear, leading to mass unemployment, then we need to do something to support the huge numbers of people that no longer have any income. Taxes to support a UBI program seem one solution. Or maybe the labor market can shift to find opportunities for humans that AI can't replace and we'd avoid the mass unemployment. But feels like we're a long way from that right now.
We have "disappeared" ~97% of jobs since the Industrial Revolution started, and no increased unemployment has materialized. Until you understand how something that counter intuitive happened, you should not speculate on how AI replacing current jobs will play out!
By this logic owners of wheel barrows should be taxed for all the manual labour jobs the wheel barrow destroyed.
Exactly. This is such a silly argument. The article takes the argument "if a lot of jobs disappeared since they are now done effectively for free, what about tax revenue??" It really misses the forrest from the trees. You're transported into a world in which efficiencies mean that much fewer people need to work, but somehow government services and entitlements are unchanged and we need to hit roughly the same percent…
Either way, I'm so sick and tired of people talking about the effect on GDP. GDP is a terrible way to measure anything remotely meaningful. GDP has gone up and up and things have gotten worse and worse for more and more people; GDP could go down a lot and things could still get better for many people. Without some kind of (in)equality adjustment, GDP is meaningless at best and misleading at worst.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If full AGI dreams are achieved and 80% of jobs disappear, leading to mass unemployment, then we need to do something to support the huge numbers of people that no longer have any income. Taxes to support a UBI program seem one solution. Or maybe the labor market can shift to find opportunities for humans that AI can't replace and we'd avoid the mass unemployment. But feels like we're a long way from that right now.
We have "disappeared" ~97% of jobs since the Industrial Revolution started, and no increased unemployment has materialized. Until you understand how something that counter intuitive happened, you should not speculate on how AI replacing current jobs will play out!
No?
Hmmmmmm.
Serious question: when will the AI generate the perfect taxation system/budget combination?
In fact, we avoid a lot of difficult moral dilemmas because we accept the systems are crappy and just a necessary evil. The closest you claim to be to perfection, the more you have to acknowledge that some moral questions are just impossible to settle to everyone's satisfaction.
Is the life of child X more important than the life of child X because of a score calculated based on their grades, parents' income, etc? The system we have today may implicitly result in such outcomes, but at least it's not intentional.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't need taxes to pay a UBI. If "every country" is in debt, who owns the debt exactly? ... (it's not real debt)
The problem with socialism, is eventually, one runs out of other people's money. For an example of what unlimited borrowing and money printing results in, look up Germany in 1921--1923
(It was piss.)
By this logic owners of wheel barrows should be taxed for all the manual labour jobs the wheel barrow destroyed.
We, as a society, allow corporations to pull resources from the commons because the other side of it is that their existence provides a value through jobs and tax revenue and such.
If the equation shifts such that the benefits dry up, but the downsides only increase, why should we allow that?
The solution could be as simple as higher business taxes or as wild as universal basic income.
It could be something like all AI is forced to be open source, open weight, free at least as far as the knowledge parts.
There's certainly no God given right to exclusively benefit from an invention. We allow that for as long as we care to.
And there's nothing illogical about changing these decisions as factors change.
By this logic owners of wheel barrows should be taxed for all the manual labour jobs the wheel barrow destroyed.