I'm more interested in whether we even could make "it" pay taxes.
Suspect we're at a point where any single gov would struggle to control the megacorps. Not just big tech, but in general.
If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
231–240 of 1001 posts
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#232It feels really alien to discuss this in terms of "taxing AI", like an economic abstraction completely breaking down. Ultimately when you take automation to its logical conclusion we have people with needs and we have machines and automation capable of meeting those needs with minimal human labor. No matter how you try to resolve this economically, it should hold that if something can be produced with minimal human l…
I think the idea is that the trillionaires won't need us at all when the food supply is fully automated. They might keep a small population for genetic diversity, but that's about it.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#233No, 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.
What's crazy is that productivity per employee just keeps increasing year after year, but successive neoliberal governments continue to lower corporate taxes. They should be doing the exact opposite! Taxes should be raised as productivity increases! AI is just one more tool that gradually increases productivity, among others.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#234No, 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 right thing. Let's say one compaagny makes everything.
Then it should be asked to give a part of it for free. Not necessarily money by the way.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#235No, 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.
What's crazy is that productivity per employee just keeps increasing year after year, but successive neoliberal governments continue to lower corporate taxes. They should be doing the exact opposite! Taxes should be raised as productivity increases! AI is just one more tool that gradually increases productivity, among others.
> but successive neoliberal governments continue to lower corporate taxes.
By itself it wouldn't be a problem, the problem is at the same time they raise taxes for people doing OK, and salaries are mostly stagnating.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#236No, 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.
What's crazy is that productivity per employee just keeps increasing year after year, but successive neoliberal governments continue to lower corporate taxes. They should be doing the exact opposite! Taxes should be raised as productivity increases! AI is just one more tool that gradually increases productivity, among others.
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Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#237Capitalism can only work when there's cheap labor and someone consumes the fruit of said labor.
When nobody earns is the same as everyone earns the same amount (aka inflation) as long as there have been humans, there will be someone grabbing more than everyone else.
So question would be how do you make transition into a world where there's less paid work?
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Taxing wealth is much harder on a practical and algorithmic level than taxing income. 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 E…
Financial assets are extremely easy to hide. Set up an international chain of shell companies, foundations, and trusts, install a fake beneficial owner or trustee or two at various points, carve out deductibles for IP and "services", and the ownership becomes completely opaque.
And that's just the legal version.
I know someone who used to work as a business lawyer. She spent years trying to track down the true owners in various cases. At the very least it's an expensive business. And sometimes it just couldn't be done.
Of course governments can cut the knot with physical assets, walk into a building with troops and/or police, and say "This is ours now." Or they can order banks to hand over the money in accounts.
But before they can do that, there has to be some certainty about the owner. And even getting part way there can take a while and cost a lot.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#239What you're asking is equivalent to asking whether capital should pay taxes.
I used to like the phrase "that idea is deeper that it first sounds", but Enron Musk ruined that for me.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Taxing wealth is much harder on a practical and algorithmic level than taxing income. 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 E…
But financial assets do not need physical space, so they can be tied to smaller countries which will be very happy to tax them at a lower rate so they can "steal them" from the original country where they were generated.
You can take your financial assets with you but they're ultimately worthless, they're just a construct that represents something which has real value, like shares of a company: its real estate, inventory, employees, institutional knowledge, and future productive output have real value, your piece of paper doesn't.
Distribution of wealth is about the distribution of real resources, especially control over human labor. And that underlying thing can always be taxed, optimized, or even repurposed to better serve the needs of society.