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If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

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Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#171

Post by zkmon »

Spacecosmonaut wrote: post #164
zkmon wrote: post #152

AI is not replacing workers. It might automate a few steps in a workflow, which require dealing with natural language, image content or applying knowledge from the web or internal data stores. It enables a bit more automation of work than it was possible earlier. Automation alone did never reduce jobs significantly.

If you take the ambitions of robotics and AI companies seriously then what they are trying to create is the equivalent of unleashing 100 million cloned copies of the smartest and most well adjusted people you know upon the economy at a fraction of the cost. If they succeed it would absolutely reduce jobs significantly. In fact, its a little hard to imagine how the average Joe would have any economic value at all.

Amazon website is equivalent to 100 million cloned sales people who work at retail shops. It didn't cause global unemployment.

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#172

Post by epolanski »

Interesting how this argument is only popping now that technology is threatening white collar workers.

Automation has been shoving blue collars out of the job market for a century.

A single farmer can do with his machinery today what took a dozen of people just 50 years ago.

Manufacturing has been super automated long ago.

Even in commerce automated checkout has been replacing workers for more than a decade.

In any case such a tax is not only pointless but actively dangerous, as all it achieves is making countries without such a tax more competitive.

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#173

Post by katsura »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #149
useumix wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Directly taxing AI is very hard. Imagine if a company had to pay taxes for every AI agent operating in the U.S. or the E.U. As if they were regular employees. Big corporations would simply move the AI agents to countries without taxes.

It's actually trivial. AI apis are pretty streamlined by now. Just slap a tax on processed tokens and you're guaranteed to reach every AI agent out there. It already happens everywhere with sales tax for normal products. Just treat tokens as the product and create an extra tax for it.

How will that work with local/offline agents? They are getting better and better.

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#174

Post by zkmon »

tempfile wrote: post #170
zkmon wrote: post #152

AI is not replacing workers. It might automate a few steps in a workflow, which require dealing with natural language, image content or applying knowledge from the web or internal data stores. It enables a bit more automation of work than it was possible earlier. Automation alone did never reduce jobs significantly.

> Automation alone did never reduce jobs significantly. Unless you mean "all jobs across the entire economy", this is pretty obviously false. People used to weave fabrics by hand, make screws and nails by hand, bake bread by hand. These jobs hardly exist anymore. Of course this did not imply that all jobs disappeared and the economy collapsed. But the sense in which "AI is not replacing workers" is contingent on spec…

I did mean "all jobs across the entire economy"

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#175

Post by smikhanov »

blitzar wrote: post #163
smikhanov wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need to think about this more, but the first thing that comes to my mind is not that this looks like “taxing the tool”, but that this can (ought to?) be similar to an alcohol or a fuel duty. Nobody calls alcohol duty “micromanagement”. For products like petrol, it’s widely known that from money paid for a liter when it’s sold, say, in the UK, more money stays in the UK’s government pocket via a complex web of taxes…

Alcohol duty, levies on cigarettes, gambling, sugar taxes etc are considered "sin taxes" and are certainly micromanagement. “taxing the tool” makes me think of transaction taxes, like a tobin tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobin_tax

Well, fuel duty is a better example then

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#176

Post by marvinblum »

Of course not, otherwise the rich wouldn't get richer and that would be bad for power consolidation. Everything is moving into this direction, so why should it be different with AI?

We had this discussions for years with factory machines, and nothing came out of it. Don't get me wrong, I hate having taxes for everything (living in Germany with ~65% total tax strain for me if you include everything), but this is about power and stealing other peoples work.

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#178

Post by aetherspawn »

aetherspawn wrote: post #165

Well for starters, robots shouldn’t be tax deductible because you get a net deduction already from not paying wages, so you should pay maximum tax on their purchase price. (Otherwise you would buy a robot.. tax deduct it, then pay less tax by not paying wages, which basically means humans would be paying tax to offset the cost of corporates buying robot to replace their own jobs which doesn’t seem fair) Plus, they sh…

You know in an ideal world, maybe these robots don’t last that long, but they still end up slightly cheaper than workforce, so we just tax the hell out of them and give all the money back to the people as UBI and that’s how we achieve the UBI utopia.

Or maybe we treat them like motor cars and make people register them on an annual basis if they’re going to use them commercially… like $30k/year or something.

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#179

Post by seabass-labrax »

gargan wrote: post #121

No taxation without representation. AI Boston Tea Party follows. Leading to a new AI run nation aka Skynet...

Companies in western democracies usually pay tax in addition to their workers and owners, but don't have representation in parliaments separate to that of their workers and owners. Questions about whether robots have the right to vote has more to do with their humanity and less to do with their tax liability in such societies.
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