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AI employees don't pay taxes

alec.is

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Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#51

Post by kridsdale1 »

paxys wrote: post #36

The article and the entire "AI will take all our jobs" doomer moment is idiotic. No one is losing their job to AI and no one will lose their job to AI in the long term without better jobs opening up in their place, same as every single technological innovation in history. But humoring the author for a moment, and taking their argument to the extreme - let's say AI does take the majority of jobs, and taxes on human pr…

My wife quite literally lost her job (extremely high annual review scores for ten years) explicitly due to AI.

A reorg happened and the new people said they were closing her whole department because they think Copilot can do it.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#52

Post by magicalist »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #41
snuxoll wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This seems like an overly complicated phrasing of the much simpler "are progressive taxes and social safety nets actually bad?"

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#53

Post by Alchemista »

paxys wrote: post #36

The article and the entire "AI will take all our jobs" doomer moment is idiotic. No one is losing their job to AI and no one will lose their job to AI in the long term without better jobs opening up in their place, same as every single technological innovation in history. But humoring the author for a moment, and taking their argument to the extreme - let's say AI does take the majority of jobs, and taxes on human pr…

So you are really going with the unreasonably optimistic take that wealth will actually be redistributed to those that don't have it? Take a look at the slums in India and other periods of history where the lower classes lived in squalor and let me know how confident you are.

That said, I do not think gen AI in its current incarnation is actually going to destroy everyone's jobs.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#54

Post by peteforde »

Cynicism about corporate accountability, regulation, oversight and legal consequences is a much larger concern than LLMs displacing people from what David Graeber would have called shitty jobs.

When I read a post that presumes that corporations are above the law and that it's a closed issue, I get sad. We can have nice things, but we must stop supporting governments that aggressively deregulate, prioritize mergers over public good, and compel their law enforcement to focus on hunting migrants instead of forcing corporations to pay taxes.

Talking about these systemic issues as though they are unsolvable because clearly corporations gonna corporation is maddening.

I don't understand why they don't jail corporate directors who are ultimately responsible for approving creative accounting tricks. If there's no penalty, of course they aren't going to do the right thing.

The greatest trick the devil can play in this era is convincing the public that their enemy is the least powerful people in society, not the most powerful.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#55

Post by tick_tock_tick »

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…

> It's all just efficiency gains and everyone currently employed stays employed? Not a single AI company wants that. Not a single tech company wants that. Not only do they want layoffs, they're already happening. So that's not going to work out.

Every single AI company and tech company would be 100% ok with just efficiency gains. They want to make money and proving efficiency is more then enough for that.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#56

Post by AuthAuth »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #41
snuxoll wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, all members of the state should benefit from state programs. There is little value in adding an exclusionary check to state programs.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#57

Post by wyldfire »

nradov wrote: post #50
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.

> Corporations already pay income tax, as do the investors in those corporations.

Of course!

> Just because productivity increases

Yeah I guess I'm taking a leap here where robots replace human manual labor and artificial intelligence replaces intellectual labor and there's no role for human labor anymore.

What's the just thing to do in this case? In my opinion, it's not "well we should really be committed to the existing rules because it's worked out well so far." If humans exit the workforce, the way governments work should change to answer such a significant change.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#58

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

I am not sure I understand the opinion piece listed, but it does have one fragment that I can confirm as happening and it is that the use is effectively being mandated. Take it as you will, but my company rolled out next year's goals. Can you take a guess as to what they contain and what people will do to accomplish those goals. Hang in tight. It is going to be a bumpy ride. And here is a thing, I actually like this tech.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#59

Post by paxys »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #51
paxys wrote: post #36

The article and the entire "AI will take all our jobs" doomer moment is idiotic. No one is losing their job to AI and no one will lose their job to AI in the long term without better jobs opening up in their place, same as every single technological innovation in history. But humoring the author for a moment, and taking their argument to the extreme - let's say AI does take the majority of jobs, and taxes on human pr…

My wife quite literally lost her job (extremely high annual review scores for ten years) explicitly due to AI. A reorg happened and the new people said they were closing her whole department because they think Copilot can do it.

Layoffs are a symptom of our shit economy and rising interest rates. Companies have been doing constant rounds of layoffs since at least 2021. The only thing that has changed in the last ~year is that leadership includes "replaced with AI" in the layoff announcement so investors reward them for their "innovation" rather than penalize them for overhiring and missing targets, and employees direct blame to some faceless machine rather than actual people who screwed them over. The work is still being passed on to existing employees like always, and the $20/mo Copilot subscription they get is being immediately ignored.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#60

Post by nospice »

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]

That sounds evasive. I share the parent's view that the article appears to be largely LLM-written. Given that you cite "your AI assistant", I'm guessing you did lean on an LLM here, perhaps without realizing that it imparted a very distinctive tone.

And honestly, it just cracks me up that it's usually the authors writing about AI lean on the tech. Including the critics...

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