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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?

#201

Post by baobun »

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…

The issue I have with your proposal is that it discloses too much metadata to tax authorities in order to enforce compliance. They'll have an almost perfect map of the legal compute in their jurisdiction. Access to compute should be free to all and not gated by taxes.

Tax on electricity is already a thing. That can be adjusted and even be made progressive. Extra for fossils and so on.

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

#202

Post by gorgoiler »

There could also be a moral case for dropping taxation on industrial inputs altogether, and tax solely on the outputs. That would mean zero rating the labor input. No more income tax or income related welfare tax, which this article posits will be dropping away anyway as more automation arrives. Instead, the outputs of the economy would be taxed.

Revenue would then come from the consumption of economic output via a sales tax, most likely a new, progressive tax based on your annual spending rather than a flat percentage of every sale. It could be applied on the manufacturers profits via corporation tax but taxes are for the benefit of actual people so I’d lean on the former rather than the latter. The more you rely on corporation tax the more vulnerable you are to international shenanigans.

How would you feel if your take home pay nearly doubled but you had to pay X% of your credit card bill to the taxman?

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

#203

Post by corobo »

aetherspawn wrote: post #178
aetherspawn wrote: post #165

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 sh…

You know in an ideal world, maybe these robots don’t last that long, but they still end up slightly cheaper than workforce, so we just tax the hell out of them and give all the money back to the people as UBI and that’s how we achieve the UBI utopia. Or maybe we treat them like motor cars and make people register them on an annual basis if they’re going to use them commercially… like $30k/year or something.

> maybe these robots don’t last that long

Landfills full of broken robots is totally something humans would do haha

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

#205

Post by rjdj377dhabsn »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #33
appreciatorBus wrote: post #17

By this logic owners of wheel barrows should be taxed for all the manual labour jobs the wheel barrow destroyed.

It’s not about logic. It’s about humanity. We are losing.

Sure doesn't feel like it. Life's never been better for more people.

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

#207

Post by corobo »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #194
gargan wrote: post #121

No 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.

As long as they start with the titular character that's a fair end to the species

Chances are half of humans would vote for it too

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

#208

Post by scotty79 »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #149
useumix wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

You could tax the energy and subsidize it for individuals. It's the ultimate resource that all business uses. But that would mean unscrupulous countries could tax their energy less and attract AI farms. So probably you need to tax imported tokens (and other goods) as well. There could be many benefits of taxing grid energy instead of labor.
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