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AI employees don't pay taxes

alec.is

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Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#81

Post by arm32 »

nospice wrote: post #60
arm32 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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...

Busted. I am a human-in-the-loop.

I think everybody should use LLMs to polish their language. This topic is important to me and I want to communicate as effectively as possible.

I stand by every character of the article regardless of which fancy autocomplete I used to polish it. I use spellcheck, too, and a digital tuner for my guitar.

Just want to reiterate: https://alec.is/posts/ai-employees-dont-pay-taxes/#:~:text=I...

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#82

Post by Jcampuzano2 »

BloondAndDoom wrote: post #67
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.

Payroll taxes are the worst for small companies followed by strong labor law. Strong Labor laws are good if the company has 500-1000+ people but not able to fire someone within the month with reason is just dumb (I’m looking at Europe). It indeed causes many startups to hire 50% less people than they can. I honestly don’t understand taxing anyone making less than something like 500K. Don’t tax anyone earns less than…

Not taxing anyone under 500k would remove a very large share of tax revenue. Combining that with higher corporate taxes would be nice, but if it got pushed too high (which it would in this scenario) we would simply see corporate flight from the US to elsewhere or it would eliminate practically all the benefit of lower taxes from the less wealthy as the cost of goods would skyrocket.

There isn't really a silver bullet unless people in the US as a whole culturally become less consumerist and our entire economy is restructured around that fact.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#83

Post by its_ethan »

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…

In those thousands of years of history, did we ever have multiple cities with populations over 10 million people? Did we have electricity demands? Were the agriculture/ food expectations the same?

Are you really trying to make the argument that if a significant chunk of the population is forced into unemployment, that's fine we'll just tax all the stuff that automated jobs away and it'll all just work out? Panic sets in if unemployment hits like 10% because of all the negative consequences it has on societal outcomes. Just assuming the government is gonna magically be able to reallocate resources it gets from taxing the automated systems that replace human work is a pretty insane thing to expect to work imo.

There are a hell of a lot of assumptions baked into your thinking that need to be explained and probably put under more scrutiny.

Take "We don't have to all commit to back breaking labor for ~100% of our functional life just because this is the system most of us were born into and we don't know any better" for example.

No we don't need to do manual labor 24/7, but what people generally do need is a purpose. Purpose here meaning something akin to meeting an expectation that they contribute to their own survival and to the benefit of society, even if abstractly. Take a look at most NEETs and I don't think you're going to find healthy thriving individuals, I think you're going to find people who are resigned to life and checked out. We didn't evolve to sit on our hands.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#84

Post by andsoitis »

BloondAndDoom wrote: post #67
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.

Payroll taxes are the worst for small companies followed by strong labor law. Strong Labor laws are good if the company has 500-1000+ people but not able to fire someone within the month with reason is just dumb (I’m looking at Europe). It indeed causes many startups to hire 50% less people than they can. I honestly don’t understand taxing anyone making less than something like 500K. Don’t tax anyone earns less than…

> I honestly don’t understand taxing anyone making less than something like 500K. Don’t tax anyone earns less than this, focus all tax collection to top 1%

Top 1% currently contribute 40-42% of taxes.

Top 10% contribute 72-75%.

The bottom 50% contribute only 2-3%.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#85

Post by kelseyfrog »

It's only a matter of time until the zero-employee unicorn becomes technically possible.

The path there looks like Uber's early playbook:

* Run the company as if AI outputs are attributable corporate acts with liability clearly sitting at the corporate entity level.

* Scale faster than attribution doctrine can be practically enforced.

* Cross the "too big to fail" line. ie: become economically and operationally indispensable.

* Force doctrinal clarification, where courts recognize AI-mediated decision systems as a basis for corporate attribution, without inventing new legal persons.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#86

Post by fuzztester »

Don't worry, all. They (the madmen, er, badmen) will come up with an AI-currency (like crypto) that AIs can "pay" to the govt. as taxes, and all will be hunky-dory - for them and their masters, that is.

For the rest of us - well, life is finite, anyway. So might as well make it finito.

;)

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#87

Post by bigfatkitten »

didgetmaster wrote: post #73

What if AI can greatly reduce the amount of money (i.e. tax receipts) that the government needs to function properly? What if AI can quickly determine who really qualifies for government assistance, and cuts off all the fraudsters without needing an army of bureaucrats? We could even cut out a ton of middle-men and return congress to a part-time job. One can only dream, right?

> What if AI can quickly determine who really qualifies for government assistance, and cuts off all the fraudsters without needing an army of bureaucrats?

Australia tried that, and it did not go well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#88

Post by zrn900 »

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…

> the logical conclusion is "no economy at all"

Marx called it 150 years ago. Its happening precisely how it said it would.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#89

Post by [deleted] »

lovich wrote: post #6
quantified wrote: post #2

There 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…

[deleted]

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#90

Post by nothrabannosir »

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.

Author confirmed they used an LLM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46427769
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