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If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

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Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#161

Post by tempfile »

useumix wrote: post #143
erehweb wrote: post #93

Looking at the actual article, the people suggesting taxes on AI are American Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps, and Bill Gates, founder of MSFT. The Europeans suggest more general taxes on capital instead.

Directly taxing AI is very hard. Imagine if a company had to pay taxes for every AI agent operating in the U.S. or the E.U. As if they were regular employees. Big corporations would simply move the AI agents to countries without taxes.

Don't people give pretty much exactly this argument about all taxes?

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#162

Post by KoftaBob »

Maybe you could have a system where, in the extreme case, a fully automated company with just a few executives gets taxed on a fixed percentage of its revenue. For every human employee they hire, they can deduct 110% of that person’s total compensation (salary + benefits) from the revenue that’s subject to tax.

That way it’s beneficial in both directions: if they stay fully automated, they’re effectively helping to fund something like a UBI through higher taxes on their automation-driven profits. But they’re also strongly incentivized to hire humans anywhere it actually makes sense, because every real job they create directly reduces their tax burden.

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#163

Post by blitzar »

smikhanov wrote: post #140
Terr_ wrote: post #132

Earlier 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…

Alcohol duty, levies on cigarettes, gambling, sugar taxes etc are considered "sin taxes" and are certainly micromanagement.

“taxing the tool” makes me think of transaction taxes, like a tobin tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobin_tax

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#164

Post by Spacecosmonaut »

zkmon wrote: post #152

AI 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.

If you take the ambitions of robotics and AI companies seriously then what they are trying to create is the equivalent of unleashing 100 million cloned copies of the smartest and most well adjusted people you know upon the economy at a fraction of the cost. If they succeed it would absolutely reduce jobs significantly. In fact, its a little hard to imagine how the average Joe would have any economic value at all.

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#165

Post by aetherspawn »

Well for starters, robots shouldn’t be tax deductible because you get a net deduction already from not paying wages, so you should pay maximum tax on their purchase price.

(Otherwise you would buy a robot.. tax deduct it, then pay less tax by not paying wages, which basically means humans would be paying tax to offset the cost of corporates buying robot to replace their own jobs which doesn’t seem fair)

Plus, they should probably add a 50% VAT or something like that on initial purchase, which covers displaced tax for at least 1-2 years and can help cover any initial teething issues or increases in social services.

I personally don’t think I can deal with living in a society where robots are so cheap that within 5 years or whatever there’s 2-3 times the human population worth of robots. Tax it all to hell, because that sounds maddening.

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#167

Post by zkmon »

fgh_azer wrote: post #157
zkmon wrote: post #152

AI 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.

And where did the farmers go? The children of farmers were absorbed into jobs that were created for automating the farming and other industrial work. Farm automation did not cause unemployment overall.

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#168

Post by blitzar »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #117
victorbjorklund wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does lead to people loosing their job. If you have a pile of dirt that needs 3 people to move it with buckets but now 1 person can move the same pile with a wheelbarrow then the 2 others are out of a job. Same as when one developer with AI can do the job of 3 developers and the other 2 are fired.

do you have stats on moving of dirt with buckets vs. moving with wheelbarrows? Or is this just an assumption you are making? I think probably an assumption because how often do people move piles of dirt without wheelbarrows nowadays so where would you actually have your data from? In my anecdotal experience moving piles of dirt manually (for large piles of dirt) it is generally the digging up of the dirt that takes t…

you got papers for that bucket and shovel working on site today?

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#170

Post by tempfile »

zkmon wrote: post #152

AI 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.

> Automation alone did never reduce jobs significantly.

Unless you mean "all jobs across the entire economy", this is pretty obviously false. People used to weave fabrics by hand, make screws and nails by hand, bake bread by hand. These jobs hardly exist anymore.

Of course this did not imply that all jobs disappeared and the economy collapsed. But the sense in which "AI is not replacing workers" is contingent on specific features of software development, not about automation in general.

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