If AI replaces workers, we wouldn't have an economy. It would probably be the end of capitalism. Or at least the end of the consumerism driven capitalism that we have known since the end of WWII. I don't know what would follow but it probably wouldn't be pretty. Honestly at that point, I could see the end of humanity. If truly we get to the point that machine intelligence is more capable and people are entirely marginalized then it's game over. At best a few human specimen end up on display in zoos, but maybe machines might not even have any use for zoos, since they can just share "experience" digitally.
If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
181–190 of 1001 posts
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#182Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's actually trivial. AI apis are pretty streamlined by now. Just slap a tax on processed tokens and you're guaranteed to reach every AI agent out there. It already happens everywhere with sales tax for normal products. Just treat tokens as the product and create an extra tax for it.
How will that work with local/offline agents? They are getting better and better.
Audits? Like it happens with licensed software. The issue is that if any country won't play ball with either not adding the taxes or by closing an eye, everyone is gonna put their datacentes there and become un-auditable.
I guess the other countries can slap sanctions on them, but the people benefitting won't care really.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#184No, not the AI. Just the owner
of means of production like AI.
The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems is, in my view, one of the fundamental problems of our time.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
The latter makes sense. We also don't let steam engines and carts pay taxes just because they 'replace' (=displace) human labor. Don't tax tools or income, tax the accumulation of it: wealth.
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 think the simplest explanation is also the best one. Like you said, it is very difficult to tax wealth.
I think we have no option other than taxing loans and other money movements like that in sufficiently large scale as ordinary income. If I get a loan for USD 200k for a house once a year, I think it isn't income but if ElMo gets loans worth USD 20M a year, every year, he should pay income tax on all of that as if it was ordinary income. How he pays it? I don't care. Sell some assets. Oh and that sale is also taxable.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#186Earlier 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…
> Nobody calls alcohol duty “micromanagement”.
They don't, but it really is! There's different rates for different specific gravity and different processes.
Re: petrol, I note that the UK government is trying to replace this as part of the EV transition with a milage tax, which is proving controversial and fiddly.
Energy tax is a hugely fraught political issue. The "poster child" for cheap energy is a little old lady huddled over a 1kW one bar electric heater. Energy bills are a big "fixed" cost for households. Many small businesses have been affected by energy price rises - e.g. restaurants. And yet at the other end AI represents such a huge deployment of capital expenditure that it's distorting prices for everything else - energy, RAM, and so on.
I think I'd favor a "personal allowance" model similar to income tax, where you get the first X units of energy tax free and then have to pay VAT, carbon taxes etc. on the rest of it.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#187No, not the AI. Just the owner of means of production like AI. The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems is, in my view, one of the fundamental problems of our time.
100% agree! I find quite concerning that this point is not immediate in any conversation about AI or robots impacting the number of jobs, and the subsequent conversation about innovating new taxes. AI and robots are capital as any other automation on a factory, and capital gains should be taxed appropriately. This is not a new thing completely separate from the untouchable status quo wrt existing taxes. If it tickles your political kneejerk, explore that, but playing tax sci-fi is distracting and thus dangerous.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#188AI 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.
I see AI replacing workers, but maybe it is my circles. Most of my SaaS selling friends; these are long term, as in 20+ year solution sellers in ERP, HRM, trading, banking in certain niches therein making very good money, removing most of their staff while delivering faster and better with the few senior core people they kept. Junior/Mediors can please go away...
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
The latter makes sense. We also don't let steam engines and carts pay taxes just because they 'replace' (=displace) human labor. Don't tax tools or income, tax the accumulation of it: wealth.
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.
> Taxing wealth is much harder on a practical and algorithmic level than taxing income.
Depends on the tax. It is a lot easier to move move profits to a low tax jurisdiction than it is to move land or machinery.
> 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 definitely agree with that.
There are all sorts of problems. Do you tax this notional "income" where the work is done or where the AI runs or where the company that owns it is incorporated?
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 spec…
I did mean "all jobs across the entire economy"
But that suggests that if AI were to displace all programming ever, then as long as there were still some jobs, you would still consider that "AI is not replacing workers". Does that not stretch the meaning of "not replacing"?