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AI employees don't pay taxes

alec.is

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Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#101

Post by tdeck »

TheCleric wrote: post #47
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). S…

A lot of the interest groups arguing for means testing on public benefits actually don't want those things to exist at all. Adding means tests to them is a way of making them more and more inaccessible while claiming it's simply about fareness. It's a deliberate strategy.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#102

Post by jeltz »

fullstackwife wrote: post #76
HNisCIS wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think it implies?

for example driverless taxis, which is an application of AI that most of us really want

Most people living in the US maybe. For most people living in European cities driverless taxis would not change much. Maybe more congestion.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#103

Post by tombert »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #100

AI employees are not employees. They are tools, not people. The fallacy here is applying a closed world assumption where the amount of code doesn't change but more of it is written by AIs and sold for the same dollar amount. And therefore less taxes get paid. That assumption is wrong; and so are the conclusions and sand castles built on it. The reality is that whenever we give programmers better tools, we get more pr…

I agree. It's not like we're ever going to get to a state where we say "oh wow, all potential work is done, there's literally nothing left to do".

Like pretty much every technical innovation in history, when we have access to more tools, we just figure out how to solve bigger problems. People might have felt bad for horse breeders who lots out when planes, trains, and automobiles became ubiquitous, but people adapted around it. Now people can work and travel around the world, and there are industries around all these things. It's generally applied to parallelism, but I think it applies here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law

While I've had my issues with the "vibe coding" performance right now, ultimately if I can get something to handle the boring and tedious parts of programming, then that frees up time for me to focus on stuff that I find more fun or interesting, or at the very least it frees me up to work on more complicated problems instead of spending half a day writing and deploying yet another "move stuff from one Kafka topic to another Kafka topic" program.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#104

Post by emodendroket »

Aerolfos wrote: post #49
peteforde wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

One problem with any shibboleths people are looking for is as people see more AI writing they're more likely to begin to pick up AI phrasing. I mean, if the power of Web apps can revive the past participle "gotten" in the UK, it shouldn't be surprising it can get people to use the verb "delve" more often.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#105

Post by emodendroket »

echelon wrote: post #32
spankalee wrote: post #12

What is the world is an "AI employee"?

Currently, companies employ humans. Companies pay payroll taxes and employees pay income taxes. The state makes money to pay for social services. When companies begin replacing humans with cold, dead infrastructure, that infrastructure doesn't pay taxes. Payroll and income taxes revenues are gone. Furthermore, those humans aren't making an income with which to further stimulate the economy. They can't pay for the goo…

Yes, but the idea of demand for a given type of labor falling due to automation isn't a new one and it's not clear what this "AI employee" framing gives us over thinking of it in those terms.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#106

Post by nothrabannosir »

QuiDortDine wrote: post #43
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.

I don't disagree with the first part, but income tax falls into the exact same logic of "why punish people because they contribute to the economy by [working]?"

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#107

Post by joquarky »

satvikpendem wrote: post #71
arm32 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Did you, or did you not, use any AI or LLMs in the process of writing this article?

Who cares?

A lot of people with disabilities are also using LLMs to level the playing field and to compete with non-disabled people.

Are you going to be the person who tells them they need to stay out, stop using this technology, and stay in their "place"?

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#108

Post by numpad0 »

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]

Em dashes aren't rare because of disuse. It's a Unicode character that can't be easily typed from a Western language keyboards -- real humans shouldn't be able to vocalize it. Hence it's considered an AI giveaway.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#109

Post by pton_xd »

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…

> Apart from being all AI-written

I think nearly 100% of blog posts are run through an LLM now. The author was lazy and went with the default LLM "tone" and so the typical LLM grammar usage and turns of phrase are too readily apparent.

It's really disheartening as I read blogs to get a perspective on what another human thinks and how their thought process works. If I wanted to chat with a LLM, I can open a new tab.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#110

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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…

> Which means there's less workers being paid, less taxes, less money to be spent on the economy, which means less money to pay workers, which means... the logical conclusion is "no economy at all".

Except that's not how the economy works.

Suppose you automate web development. Fewer people get paid for that anymore. Does it increase long-term unemployment? Not really, because it creates surplus. Now everybody else has a little extra money they didn't have to spend on web development, and they'll want to buy something with it, so you get new jobs making whatever it is they want to spend the money on instead.

The only way this actually breaks down is if people stop having anything more they want to buy. But that a) seems pretty unlikely and b) implies that we've now fully automated the production of necessities, because otherwise there would be jobs providing healthcare, growing food, building houses, etc.

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