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AI employees don't pay taxes

alec.is

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Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#41

Post by gjsman-1000 »

snuxoll wrote: post #33
Saline9515 wrote: post #25

Payroll taxes are inefficient as they discourage work and increase its cost for employers, leading to lower hiring. If payroll taxes vanishes because of AI, it doesn't mean that we should stop using it to increase productivity, but rather reorient taxes. For instance, land value tax or consumption taxes are often seen as more efficient and fair, depending on their implementation. They also are AI-proof.

The problem with consumption taxes, as we have seen time and time again, is they disproportionately affect those with lower incomes.

Do people with lower incomes have the entitlement to all benefits of the state without paying a fair share of their own?

If anything, there’s plenty of literature showing that social programs and tax exemptions on the poor make underpaying them possible to begin with. Walmart couldn’t pay $12/hr. if tax exemptions and SNAP and other aid didn’t fill the gap.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#42

Post by CuriouslyC »

wmf wrote: post #39
CuriouslyC wrote: post #15

The 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.

the federal government has a real competitive advantage compared to private parties in terms of large buildouts. Absolutely not. WWII is over.

It was over when we built the interstate highway system too.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#43

Post by QuiDortDine »

Saline9515 wrote: post #25

Payroll taxes are inefficient as they discourage work and increase its cost for employers, leading to lower hiring. If payroll taxes vanishes because of AI, it doesn't mean that we should stop using it to increase productivity, but rather reorient taxes. For instance, land value tax or consumption taxes are often seen as more efficient and fair, depending on their implementation. They also are AI-proof.

Sales taxes are regressive and nonsensical, why punish people because they contribute to the economy by buying stuff? Just do income tax.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#44

Post by peteforde »

arm32 wrote: post #40
Aerolfos wrote: post #38

Apart from being all AI-written: > Reality: It’s not fear; it’s math. If 30% of the workforce is displaced, and the remaining 70% have to pay for the social safety net (or UBI) required to keep the displaced alive, the math breaks. The argument being given simply avoids the question of where the economy itself is in all this. The workers pay taxes, the taxes pay for infrastructure, sure. But the workers aren't doing…

[flagged]

Also, when are people going to get tired of assuming that em dashes automatically mean something was written by an LLM? At this stage, this is such a tired observation that it's unproductive to repeat.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#45

Post by ahepp »

whalesalad wrote: post #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…

see a lot of horses around lately?

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#46

Post by fullstackwife »

HNisCIS wrote: post #24

We are once again wildly overstating the capabilities of LLMs. They'll cause some minor economic rearrangement in the next ten years but slightly better search isn't going to cause mass unemployment any time soon. This is just propaganda from the "AI" industry to further the perception that they've created a machine god. Wake me up when ClosedAI goes bankrupt.

Since when "AI" exclusively implies LLMs only?

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#47

Post by TheCleric »

websiteapi wrote: post #11

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…

Means testing has its own issues. How do you decide what the lines are? How do you design it for people just outside those lines that keeps it fair? Who enforces it? What happens when your means change?

Figuring all this stuff has a cost, both real (now you have to hire people to screen and enforce the means testing) and emotional/political (news story about a single mother who was rejected for making $1 too much).

So when advocating for means testing please keep in mind it’s a lot easier to not have it. Yes some who don’t need it will get it, but that can be better than a ballooned cost and some who do need it being blocked or dissuaded from getting it.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#48

Post by arm32 »

flunhat wrote: post #17

I 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!

Because it wasn't good enough—and for paying taxes!

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#49

Post by Aerolfos »

peteforde wrote: post #44
arm32 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Also, when are people going to get tired of assuming that em dashes automatically mean something was written by an LLM? At this stage, this is such a tired observation that it's unproductive to repeat.

I don't pay attention to em dashes, they're overused as a pithy saying for sure

The actually useful tips are here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#50

Post by nradov »

wyldfire wrote: post #35

Taxation is a response to the economy. So if the economy changes, so should taxation. Also - if corporations succeed in becoming completely independent of labor, it will happen regardless of taxation. We shouldn't say to corporations "you must hire people or else we won't have a tax base". We should say to corporations "since you no longer require humans, we will change the way taxes are applied." A century or more a…

Corporations already pay income tax, as do the investors in those corporations. Ultimately someone gets the cash from corporate dividends and stock buy-backs. Just because productivity increases (i.e. corporations are able to generate higher profit with fewer employees) doesn't imply any need to change taxation.
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