I wouldn't mind if it also pay fines for errors, hallucinations and lost time. Some artificial accountability you know.
If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
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Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#152AI is not replacing workers. It might automate a few steps in a workflow, which require dealing with natural language, image content or applying knowledge from the web or internal data stores.
It enables a bit more automation of work than it was possible earlier. Automation alone did never reduce jobs significantly.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#153This article is actually a veiled, but sensible argument for less income tax and more wealth tax.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#154If AI replaces workers and pays taxes, should it also vote and receive social security?
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#155There are 2 reasons for taxes to exist:
1. To finance the state's activities (mostly defense, social security, education, infrastructure and healthcare)
2. To disincentivize detrimental activities like smoking or fracking.
We should tax tech companies for their off-the-charts energy consumption which is not sustainable environmentally.
But taxing AI because it replaces jobs doesn't make much sense to me as the technology is supposed to produce more stuff for less overall human labour.
If the goal is to avoid concentration of wealth, governments should tax wealthy companies/individuals and redistribute by subsiding activities that are not as revenue generating but play other significant role in society, like reduce dependency on foreign imports or you know cough health cough care cough.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taxing wealth is much harder on a practical and algorithmic level than taxing income. But either way, taxing the tool is micromanaging the problem, and some powerful people cynically promote that because they can aim the details away from themselves.
I need to think about this more, but the first thing that comes to my mind is not that this looks like “taxing the tool”, but that this can (ought to?) be similar to an alcohol or a fuel duty. Nobody calls alcohol duty “micromanagement”. For products like petrol, it’s widely known that from money paid for a liter when it’s sold, say, in the UK, more money stays in the UK’s government pocket via a complex web of taxes…
> Maybe taxing a kWh of the AI data center energy consumption should be a thing?
That sounds excellent. Also water usage.
Really, AI has externalities and it should pay for it.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#157AI is not replacing workers. It might automate a few steps in a workflow, which require dealing with natural language, image content or applying knowledge from the web or internal data stores. It enables a bit more automation of work than it was possible earlier. Automation alone did never reduce jobs significantly.
Seems to me there are way fewer farmers per capita and yet much more food produced, thanks to more & improved capital use in farming.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#158We should probably let actual full automation happen before debating whether it should be taxed. Worrying about a hypothetical T-1000 future seems less urgent than reducing the homelessness that exists right in front of us.
The merits of this particular proposal aside, it's tactically important to get the ideas out there and build consensus about "where we want to get to." Otherwise you're ceding control of the Overton window to the folks aiming for techno-serfdom.
I understand the need to seed future debates early.
My hesitation comes from the fact that most proposals implicitly assume a “fixed physical capability” for AI systems — something we don’t actually have yet.
In practice, social impact won’t be determined by abstractions but by power budgets, GPU throughput, reliability of autonomous systems, and years of real-world operation.
If scaling hits physical or economic limits, the eventual policy debate may look more like progressive taxation on high-wattage compute or specialized hardware than anything being discussed today.
And if fully automated systems ever run safely for several consecutive years, that would still be early enough for the Overton window to shift.
I’m not dismissing long-term thinking.
I’m pointing out the opportunity cost: attention spent on hypothetical futures tends to displace attention from problems that exist right now. That tradeoff rarely appears in the discussion.
So for me it’s just a question of balance — how much time we allocate to tomorrow’s world versus today’s neighborhood.
From my own vantage point, the future talk feels disproportionately dominant, so the T-1000 analogy came naturally.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#159This article is actually a veiled, but sensible argument for less income tax and more wealth tax.
To me it reads like a (sensible) argument for taxing the income of a corporation equally to the income of a human.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#160Unrelated to the article but I want to address something that really rubs me up the wrong way about comments on HN.
I recall the ML phase we had before the “AI” phase and I do not remember anyone disputing that complex mathematical models can shift the economy, make or break jobs, the whole shebang.
What really irks me about comments like “AI will/won’t xyz” is the muddying of the waters by the word AI. It’s utterly meaningless but because it means nothing it has so much power. For example:
“Statistical models will take over middle class jobs”
Vs
“AI will take over middle class jobs”
In my mind, these two statements are equivalent in what they are actually saying but the latter closes off any reasonable discussion and lets the looney bin users on here (of which there are many) start with their basilisk song and dance and all the absolutely insane hot takes that come with it.