I think no income should be taxes. We should tax assets.
If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
191–200 of 1001 posts
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#192I’m beginning to realize a common thread of “HN commenters completely misunderstanding economics” is that evaluation of policy only with N=1 Company Per Industry.
Competition is the foundation of all of the positives of market dynamics. Nothing good happens in a capitalist society without competition.
Assuming that any gains in productivity will exist _solely_ to fatten the pockets of corporate executives makes sense if you think that all goods of an industry are made by one company.
However, this isn’t what happens. Pricing in a competitive environment is largely driven by what producers can profitably outcompete and deliver. Not the maximum they can charge the consumer…
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#193Haha this is the problem, we're taxing work instead of taxing wealth.
If AI is generating wealth for someone, should we tax it?
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#194No taxation without representation. AI Boston Tea Party follows. Leading to a new AI run nation aka Skynet...
That's peculiar, every single robot seems to have voted for the new Musk Kill All Humans Party. Oh well, that's democracy in action.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#195Reduce human working hours.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"?
It won't cause significant global unemployment. People would be doing some garbage work and still getting paid, instead of a desk-based white collar work.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#197Looking 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.
The problem is that rich people and large companies usually go to great lengths to avoid taxes, use loopholes or get special deals (and with great success). The missing tax income has to come from the middle class, who can't avoid it. With increased automation, this only gets more extreme.
> The missing tax income has to come from the middle class, who can't avoid it.
Taxes on labor are actually a method of extracting money form the rich capital owners.
As you mentioned it's easy for the rich people to hide their wealth and avoid taxes on its growth.
The one thing that was very hard for them to avoid or hide was purchasing labor which they had to do to enlarge their wealth. So governments taxed that.
If governments lowered the taxes on labor it wouldn't mean middle class would earn more. It would only result in capital owners paying less for work. They always pay as little as possible and how little a person is willing to work for is the same, tax or no tax. Because money in hand is what counts.
Of course since as labor is being replaced with automation this way of collecting tax on capital growth becomes less and less feasible, so things are bound to change.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#198Looking 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.
Not only that, do you tax AI that doesn’t replace humans? How can you tell? Do you tax differently depending on how many workers it replaces? How do you measure that? Do you create exemptions for non-profit or humanitarian use? How do you measure that?
I can only image the Kafkaesque tax code the government would come up with. Then it would create all sorts of weird incentives as companies attempt to minimize tax paid.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#199No, 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.
In a capitalist system, capital makes the rules for everyone. This is why capital earns more than labour. System working as intended.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ohhh! Just imagine all the new IRS jobs and government powers that would be created!