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AI employees don't pay taxes

alec.is

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Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#131

Post by websiteapi »

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…

the reality is you can't just give things to everyone. the cost is just not sustainable.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#132

Post by _DeadFred_ »

joquarky wrote: post #113
Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> we would simply see corporate flight from the US Good. If they don't want to pay for the physical and legal infrastructure to make their business possible here, then they can go elsewhere. I'm so tired of this cowardly excuse.

People who also say 'the rich will just stop' ignore that the rich work crazy hard trying to ensure they add to their billions. They already are past the point of noticeable returns for their quality of life, yet they keep at it.

In return for their super high taxes we should give them a 'contributor to society' chit or star or something. Then they can gamify over getting chits, instead of hundreds of billions more. I'll happily call Elon a '7 star citizen' and support such a game.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#133

Post by _DeadFred_ »

andsoitis wrote: post #84
BloondAndDoom wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

These numbers are useless unless you give me everyone's comparative worth.

If a top 1% individual is worth 1000x more than a bottom 50% individual, I would expect the numbers to be higher. If they are only worth 10x as much, it seems out of line and unfair to the higher payers.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#134

Post by cindyllm »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #132
joquarky wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we would simply see corporate flight from the US Good. If they don't want to pay for the physical and legal infrastructure to make their business possible here, then they can go elsewhere. I'm so tired of this cowardly excuse.

People who also say 'the rich will just stop' ignore that the rich work crazy hard trying to ensure they add to their billions. They already are past the point of noticeable returns for their quality of life, yet they keep at it. In return for their super high taxes we should give them a 'contributor to society' chit or star or something. Then they can gamify over getting chits, instead of hundreds of billions more.…

[dead]

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#135

Post by ghurtado »

bathtub365 wrote: post #130
fooqux wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally don't like using LLMs for doing anything creative, but I find it hilarious how if you're against AI for coding you're considered a Luddite by most in these parts. But blog posts? Now that's too far and you deserve to be lambasted. I don't see anything wrong with what you've done.

At least many of the comments here still seem to be human written and so are much more interesting to read than the increasing number of AI written articles that get linked.

You're absolutely right.

Although to be fair, the fact that the comment section of HN is often more interesting than TFA is something than long predates LLMs.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#136

Post by Ancapistani »

satvikpendem wrote: post #114
arm32 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But people don't want to read something they can tell is AI, and thus you lose more authority and respect from your readers. If you are interested in getting your words out, and presumably you are as otherwise this wouldn't be a public article, the use of AI does in fact hurt that goal, ironic. Finally, I will link this, about how "it's insulting to read your AI generated article:" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?i…

I have a quibble here: the people who post in response don’t want to read content they know is AI-generated.

There exists some proportion of people who don’t mind and don’t care about it enough to comment on the topic.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#137

Post by satvikpendem »

Ancapistani wrote: post #136
satvikpendem wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But people don't want to read something they can tell is AI, and thus you lose more authority and respect from your readers. If you are interested in getting your words out, and presumably you are as otherwise this wouldn't be a public article, the use of AI does in fact hurt that goal, ironic. Finally, I will link this, about how "it's insulting to read your AI generated article:" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?i…

I have a quibble here: the people who post in response don’t want to read content they know is AI-generated. There exists some proportion of people who don’t mind and don’t care about it enough to comment on the topic.

Or it's more like website bounces, they do care about it enough to close the tab but not enough to comment or specify exactly why they left on some comment section or feedback form.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#138

Post by AnthonyMouse »

tomrod wrote: post #124
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ha…

Your implicit assumption with the web dev is that this scales. Unfortunately, that may not be the case.

It's not a matter of scale. If people don't have to spend as much on X then they end up with extra money and will spend it on Y. Jobs then shift from X to Y.

This has been happening for centuries. The large majority of people used to work in agriculture. Now we can produce food with a low single digit percentage of the population. Textiles, transportation, etc. are all much less labor intensive than they were in the days of cobblers and ox carts, yet the 20th century was not marked with a 90% unemployment rate.

It's either one of two things. Either post-scarcity is possible because machines that can collect and assemble resources into whatever anybody wants at no cost are possible, and then nobody needs to work because everything is free. Or it isn't, there are still things machines can't do, and then people have jobs doing that.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#139

Post by djoldman »

> What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life to be a hundred years hence? ... for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure ... we shall endeavour ... to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week ....

- John Maynard Keynes, 1930 [0].

Keynes was an economist whose work had an enormous impact and is still discussed and taught today. He predicted much more leisure and much less work for the future and he was wrong.

Extrapolating productivity (hours of work required to create a fixed output) into the future, it makes sense that we'll need to work a lot less to make the same stuff. The missing piece is that we end up deciding we need to make other stuff/services. We fill in our extra time making new things. We're not satisfied with what we used to have.

If AI drastically increases productivity, leading to job losses, we will just make other stuff and provide other services and fill our time with that. People will create other jobs to satisfy that demand. For reference:

1700s: 90% of US workers were farmers. early 1900s: 40%, 1970: 4%

1940s: 38% of US workers were in manufacturing/factories. 2020: ~9%

As productivity improves, we come up with other things to make or services to provide that are higher complexity or "worth more".

The products and services provided by a country are not static.

[0] https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/...

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#140

Post by andsoitis »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #133
andsoitis wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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%.

These numbers are useless unless you give me everyone's comparative worth. If a top 1% individual is worth 1000x more than a bottom 50% individual, I would expect the numbers to be higher. If they are only worth 10x as much, it seems out of line and unfair to the higher payers.

> These numbers are useless unless you give me everyone's comparative worth. If a top 1% individual is worth 1000x more than a bottom 50% individual, I would expect the numbers to be higher. If they are only worth 10x as much, it seems out of line and unfair to the higher payers.

Bottom 50% earners make on average 20-25k. Top 1% earners make on average 800k-1m.

So top 1% average income is 35 -45x higher than bottom 50%.

Bottom 50% earn 11-13% of total US income. Top 1% earners 20-22% of total US income.

I don’t have an opinion of fairness either way. I’m just sharing data.

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