Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

english.elpais.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 1001 posts

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

#341

Post by zwnow »

Treegarden wrote: post #321
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…

I see a natural equilibrium with a tension: automation (also through AI) causes unit economics to drop and results in cheaper prices. At the same time, salaries for contributors grow because their impact is so high. So you end up with a new equilibrium of much cheaper prices and much higher salaries. What, however, about the people who can’t contribute? IMO the most natural and fair approach is to support (through wh…

> salaries for contributors grow

I dont see that happening

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

#342

Post by billy99k »

tossandthrow wrote: post #302
koolba wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Would you also be open to paying taxes in your 401k yearly based on unrealized gains?

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

#343

Post by airstrike »

zozbot234 wrote: post #334
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.

This is a bad deal. Capital makes the marginal worker more productive, not less. You can tax the worker and she will still be better off than if you had taxed the capital, due to greater productivity. (This argument also applies to AI, of course. Since AI doesn't just instantly wipe out all jobs, there will be many workers that will benefit from it and will thus be quite able to fund their governments and social syst…

If your argument were true we should set taxes on capital to zero, which is quite obviously a bad idea.

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

#344

Post by vjk800 »

Tractors largely replaced human labour in farming about a hundred years ago. Should we have started taxing tractors?

I really have difficulties seeing AI as anything else than yet another type of machinery. If your argument is "but it's replacing ALMOST ALL human labour" - well, the same argument was valid for tractors a hundred years ago (when almost everyone was employed in agriculture).

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

#345

Post by airstrike »

billy99k wrote: post #342
tossandthrow wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Would you also be open to paying taxes in your 401k yearly based on unrealized gains?

If I take out loans against those unrealized gains? Hell yes.

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

#346

Post by 9dev »

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…

You're completely omitting externalised cost, though. As it stands, all this production requires gargantuan amounts of energy that have to come from somewhere, and cause pollution and waste that must be accounted for. As long as these factors aren't solved—if they can be solved in the first place—either the prices for consumers or the manufacturing cost must reflect this, I don't see the increased degree automation affecting prices much.

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

#347

Post by pixl97 »

stingraycharles wrote: post #218
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.

It’s much easier to tax the general population than businesses, as they don’t push back as much. 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.

Yep, concentration of wealth leads to a smaller group of people that buy their way out of taxation leading to further concentration of wealth and services falling apart for the masses.

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

#348

Post by OGWhales »

avianlyric wrote: post #275
paxiongmap wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a capitalist system, capital makes the rules for everyone. This is why capital earns more than labour. System working as intended.

A capitalist system is built on the idea that holders of capital actually deploy that capital, rather than horde it. If capital holders don’t actually deploy that capital and compete with each other, then you don’t have a capitalist system anymore. You have a feudal system, where asset holders extract resources through rents, rather than capital deployment and risk taking.

Would this not still be the case even if labor wasn't entirely outpaced by capital?

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

#349

Post by ToucanLoucan »

zozbot234 wrote: post #334
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.

This is a bad deal. Capital makes the marginal worker more productive, not less. You can tax the worker and she will still be better off than if you had taxed the capital, due to greater productivity. (This argument also applies to AI, of course. Since AI doesn't just instantly wipe out all jobs, there will be many workers that will benefit from it and will thus be quite able to fund their governments and social syst…

> Capital makes the marginal worker more productive, not less. You can tax the worker and she will still be better off than if you had taxed the capital, due to greater productivity.

Point one: higher productivity is not necessarily our goal. I could think of numerous industries that would make the world better if they did less work.

Point two: There's a moral absurdity in taxing the wages earned by labor more heavily than the returns earned by ownership. One is tangible effort, the other is an abstraction backed by law. If anything, taxing capital should be the baseline, because it's the least tied to survival. Historically, when America was at its most broadly prosperous, capital gains and corporate profits were taxed at far higher rates than today.

Point three: AI intensifies that calculus. If AI is deployed by capital to further replace or devalue labor, then taxing only the worker is punishing the displaced while rewarding the displacer. That's pure extraction. If we want social systems to survive, the burden has to fall on the owners of the machines, not the people being replaced by them.

Genuinely one of the largest and most destructive ills of our society right now is that so tremendously more of our shared prosperity as a system is directed to those who do the least to create it.

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

#350

Post by billy99k »

fzeroracer wrote: post #307
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they are only taxed at an effective rate of 3%, there is something being taxed.

I don't think people should be able to vote on massive tax increase laws, if it doesn't also increase their own taxes in some way.

Post reply on HN