ubi just doesn't make any sense. case in point is the overwhelming negative response to the laptop 4G program in NYC with the Chromebooks. virtually every comment said it makes more sense for such a thing to be means tested and it was a waste of money since most people already had internet at their house. how ironic - if that's the attitude on this forum of all places about table stakes, imagine the reaction when you give rich people thousands of dollars a year for food. ubi is DOA.
AI employees don't pay taxes
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Re: AI employees don't pay taxes
#12What is the world is an "AI employee"?
Re: AI employees don't pay taxes
#13There is no credible model for UBI anywhere from AI. It's not going to be paid for by anyone, anywhere. Petrostates including Alaska can pay one, sort of, but they are not replacing people with automation, and their largesse won't last forever. The model of capitalism is to pay for labor and avoid taxes and fees at almost all costs. AI-enabled businesses will not seek to contribute any more to UBI than they seek to c…
Why is it that every year we are capable of producing more, but we keep asking people to accept less? Like how is “we can replace all workers with AI agents” not compatible with “we can extract enough wealth from the new profitability to sustain everyone at the current rate as a service(UBI)” If we’re more productive after replacing everyone with machines then why can’t we just cover everyone’s basic(victuals/housing…
I'm not sure if you're being facetious, but the answer is that the same mechanism that incentivizes all of this innovation prevents the gains from being distributed evenly. You can get fabulously wealthy if you can be an early mover in bringing important new technology to the market. But then you get to keep that wealth and you don't have to share it with anybody if you don't want to. So that's what ends up happening. There's probably a correct balance somewhere between incentivizing innovation and redistributing income and/or wealth, but then it's hard to preserve that balance because the wealth seekers always have an incentive to lobby for favorable policies, manipulate markets, etc. I do not believe that we as a society have managed to figure out the necessary institutions that could preserve such a balance on a multigenerational time scale.
Re: AI employees don't pay taxes
#14There is no credible model for UBI anywhere from AI. It's not going to be paid for by anyone, anywhere. Petrostates including Alaska can pay one, sort of, but they are not replacing people with automation, and their largesse won't last forever. The model of capitalism is to pay for labor and avoid taxes and fees at almost all costs. AI-enabled businesses will not seek to contribute any more to UBI than they seek to c…
The model of capitalism is to use money to build some means of production and hopefully generate more money from that. We are arriving in a form of techno-feudalism where nobody produces anything. People with means to produce will pay the owners of AI who just own and make money through renting shit to people who cant afford building their own data centers or whatever. Its what companies like Amazon or Microsoft alre…
Most businesses get their inputs from suppliers and add value to produce an output.
Even if you could afford to build your own datacenters you could not make the chips. Any realistic business will have a web of suppliers.
I think before you can diagnose "feudalism" you need to think really carefully about who has power in what parts of the value chain, and why. This will be specific to the business you are in.
I agree, it is a real problem if your suppliers are acting in a monopolistic or market distorting way.
Re: AI employees don't pay taxes
#15The easiest play is for the people to own the infrastructure AI runs on, then pay for social benefits out of infrastructure rental agreements. The cloud is massively profitable, and the federal government has a real competitive advantage compared to private parties in terms of large buildouts.
Re: AI employees don't pay taxes
#16What is the world is an "AI employee"?
It's an employee that has been replaced by AI.
Re: AI employees don't pay taxes
#17I don't get it. How does the initial anecdote about AI being shitty and sloppy tie in to the rest of the article?
> if we increasingly describe workers as merely being “human-in-the-loop,” what is the human actually there for?
Your anecdote just answered this! Because the LLM slop output in excel wasn't good enough!
Re: AI employees don't pay taxes
#18What a diarrhea take, my god. How can someone just assume finance is NOT a zero sum game?
Will AI wear adidas and rent houses?
Everybody lives of the sweat of somebody else. This should be true even in California
Re: AI employees don't pay taxes
#19The future will unironically be communism, and that's the best of possible worlds.
Re: AI employees don't pay taxes
#20> Reality: Tractors magnified physical labor; they didn’t simulate the mind. More importantly, the industrial revolution took decades. The AI displacement is happening in quarters.
Tractors are a tool - a force multiplier in getting work done - just like AI-based tooling is.
Self-checkout is taking away jobs from checkout clerks. Should we forbid self-checkout in order to maintain job security? It's the same argument.
Rewind the clock to the late 1800s and this same post could have been written about cars taking away jobs from horses.