211–220 of 1001 posts
By this logic owners of wheel barrows should be taxed for all the manual labour jobs the wheel barrow destroyed.
Corporations should be taxed on their profits, including profits boosted by the invention of new technology.
No, not the AI. Just the owner of means of production like AI. The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems is, in my view, one of the fundamental problems of our time.
In a capitalist system, capital makes the rules for everyone. This is why capital earns more than labour. System working as intended.
Around the world, every country should be allowed to make 'money' for specific cases like for teacher salaries, ... so that most people are able to work for the state or for our community. Everyone works less, everyone works better, we will then see how much humans we still need.
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The latter makes sense. We also don't let steam engines and carts pay taxes just because they 'replace' (=displace) human labor. Don't tax tools or income, tax the accumulation of it: wealth.
Taxing wealth is much harder on a practical and algorithmic level than taxing income. But either way, taxing the tool is micromanaging the problem, and some powerful people cynically promote that because they can aim the details away from themselves.
I find this argument somewhat unconvincing. Where is most of the wealth? In hard assets, such as real estate and financial assets, such as stocks and bonds. The former are very difficult to hide, for obvious reasons. As for the latter, the ownership of every single share is recorded in large databases (e.g. DTCC, Clearstream and Euroclear). In that sense, the "physical location" of most of the wealth is well known, so in theory it should really not be difficult to tax it.
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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…
> Maybe taxing a kWh of the AI data center energy consumption should be a thing? That sounds excellent. Also water usage. Really, AI has externalities and it should pay for it.
Should an AI data center from pharmaceuticals or biotech startup be taxed extra per kWh, even if the AI is purely used for medical research?
https://www.npr.org/2014/07/28/335288388/when-did-companies-...
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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.
You could tax the energy and subsidize it for individuals. It's the ultimate resource that all business uses. But that would mean unscrupulous countries could tax their energy less and attract AI farms. So probably you need to tax imported tokens (and other goods) as well. There could be many benefits of taxing grid energy instead of labor.
No, not the AI. Just the owner of means of production like AI. The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems is, in my view, one of the fundamental problems of our time.
It’s the same pattern everywhere around the world (perhaps there are a few exceptions). Businesses can be much more creative with tax evasion as well.
No, not the AI. Just the owner of means of production like AI. The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems is, in my view, one of the fundamental problems of our time.
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Taxing income is straightforward in that there is a stream of it going by and some of it can be diverted. Taxing wealth is difficult because you don't really know what it is. Arguably the value of a publicly traded corporation can be known because it is being traded continually. [1] For a privately held corporation it's quite opaque. Right now, for instance, Open AI is estimated to be worth $500B and might IPO at $1T…
I think I am fine with taking an approach to that that is just brutally tilted against large values and brutally tilted in favor of transparency. So like, you can't do anything with your ownership share in that privately-held company --- can't use it as collateral for a loan, can't present it to investors to get more funding, can't trade it, can't sell it, can't in any way derive any benefit from it --- without commi…
Sounds like a great way to throw the economy into a depression.