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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?

#301

Post by fzeroracer »

the_real_cher wrote: post #251
doener wrote: post #184

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.

I'm all for raising taxes is on the rich but the government is extremely fiscally irresponsible. The current interest on our national debt is greater than our military spending. So if you increase taxes some people think it would just be throwing it into the money fire of Washington. There needs to be a lot of changes in D.C.: term limits in congress, citizens united needs to be repealed, erc etc

When Trump did the whole tax cut thing in 2017, it massively blew up the national debt. This is because the rich got massive tax cuts.

The government is fiscally irresponsible by design, because the government is ran by the plutocrats with all the incentives to give themselves more money at the cost of everyone else.

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

#302

Post by tossandthrow »

koolba wrote: post #288
doener wrote: post #184

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.

> 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. Are you talking about taxing unrealized capital gains? Because for the situation where capital is directly replacing labor, the income generation is taxed regardless of the whether it’s generated by a human or machine. If I hire people to make an…

> One can’t spend any of the money until it becomes personal assets.

The oldest trick in the book is to use unrealized gains as collateral for loans - we even have banks specializing in this.

Oh, and the US has a law that erases the tax bill for dead people - you'd be stupid not to use this trick.

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

#303

Post by phantom784 »

eek2121 wrote: post #264
phantom784 wrote: post #263

Perhaps some sort of tax that looks at the ratio of a company's profits (or perhaps revenues) to employees, and the tax scales up if that ratio gets too high. Arguably, a "public good" that companies provide is employment, and as they increase automation, they reduce that "public good" and direct more of their revenue to themselves rather as salary for their employees.

The tax should also go to fund a UBI.

Agreed. Essentially it's either you create jobs directly, or you contribute to the UBI fund.

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

#304

Post by epolanski »

HPsquared wrote: post #258
cubefox wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's dangerous but not pointless. If we get human mass unemployment, someone has to pay for them, and if the companies offering the AI sit in the US, most countries won't be able tax OpenAI & Co directly.

If anything, US AI companies will be eating the lunches of workers from all over the world. It'll be like a service export.

I'm not sure about that to be honest.

1. Financial perspective. People are too focused on what "the best" is, rather than what is the most financially viable at scale, which is what really matters. At the peak of the Ethereum mining craze in 2016/2017 the GTX Titan X was the best performing GPU. But buying 200$ AMD Polaris GPUs was what gave you the most performance per $ and per watt.

2. Open source models keep being impressive and lagging only so much behind the closed source ones. It's hard to predict the future, but few years from now the most viable application might be to internally fine tune and deploy on whatever cloud or internal infra open source models. I have already many use cases in prod where Gemini Flash 2.0 did a great job, and that's an old model by today's standards (summarizing news/translation). Now I have in production a service that reviews pull requests and updates documentation/JIRA accordingly when they are merged. That requires quite more plumbing, agentic approach and thinking, but yet again open source models can do a terrific job already there.

3. At the end of the day, the lion share is going to be eaten by whoever provides the best applications, not models, but conversely we're also living in a space where more and more you can just build roughly-the-same-feature with few $ worth of APIs.

4. Even more, the biggest benefit will lie among those who will leverage AI in the best way. Companies and individuals able to really delegate successfully complex tasks making crazy savings. Who knows who's really gonna take the biggest advantage. Maybe US companies, maybe not.

Thus, in essence, I envy your certainties around the future, I personally have lots and lots of doubts and have no clue who's gonna eat whoever's lunch.

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

#305

Post by b3lvedere »

fainpul wrote: post #123
erehweb wrote: post #93

Looking at the actual article, the people suggesting taxes on AI are American Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps, and Bill Gates, founder of MSFT. The Europeans suggest more general taxes on capital instead.

The problem is that rich people and large companies usually go to great lengths to avoid taxes, use loopholes or get special deals (and with great success). The missing tax income has to come from the middle class, who can't avoid it. With increased automation, this only gets more extreme.

"The missing tax income has to come from the middle class, who can't avoid it."

So somewhere along the line it could be very beneficial to be poor on paper.

Or are we going to blame these people for corruption while the (ultra) rich are doing this constantly?

"It's good to be the king!" (Mel Brooks)

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

#307

Post by fzeroracer »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #271
doener wrote: post #184

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.

The top 1% already pays more than 40% of all federal income tax at a 26.09% effective rate. The bottom 50% has an effective rate of 3.7% and contributes only 3% of all tax revenues. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in... How about the rich say that 50% of the economy should pay their fair share?

> How about the rich say that 50% of the economy should pay their fair share?

How exactly do you propose that they pay their fair share when they literally do not have the money or assets to do so? Are you proposing modern day slavery? Perhaps people selling their family? I'm curious what happens if you take this line of thought to it's actual conclusion.

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

#308

Post by lux44 »

mlrtime wrote: post #246
dns_snek wrote: post #221

It 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…

Transition periods are always difficult, but they've always reached some equilibrium. Right now the spread between the two seem higher (not sure they are) but the system will bring them closer together.

There is no "system" to bring them together. Historically only revolutions and mainly violent protests have helped.

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

#309

Post by hack_edu »

haizhung wrote: post #299
doener wrote: post #184

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.

Very well put. I am working on tooling that will likely increase developer productivity by a large factor; and will most likely be used to lay off more developers as their labor is no longer required. I often ask myself whether that is ethical or not. But in the end, it’s not the tooling that’s unethical. Productivity increases are good for everyone, under normal circumstances. It’s the fact that all the gains are be…

If your tooling gains attention, will you take seed money from rich VCs?

When the product succeeds and you get offers to exit, would you sell to the uber-wealthy? They will exploit your user's data and collect the gains.

Those are the questions you should be honestly asking yourself when considering your own ethics. What's your price?

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

#310

Post by hagbarth »

brap wrote: post #306

Nations that keep placing obstacles in the path of AI (e.g. taxes) will lose to nations that don't. Ask yourself if this is a race you're willing to lose

I've seen this statement before. I'm not sure why my nation winning AI, whatever that means (first to AGI?), is better for me than some other nation?
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