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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?

#331

Post by slowmovintarget »

harperlee wrote: post #187
doener wrote: post #184

No, 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…

The real issue should not be whether they're paying the government. The issue is whether they're paying us for taking the human content of the last two thousand years and baking it into their generators.

How do we get royalties on this, like our share of the oil proceeds if we were citizens of Qatar? How do we trade our share of the contribution? There's twenty years of my posting on Reddit, Slashdot, HN, and other forums, that we know for a fact has been used in these frontier models. Great... where's my royalty check?

Pay us, not the government. We'll have to pay taxes regardless, and yes, close the tax loopholes on security-based capital gains (don't tax me for all the investment in my primary residence, that's a double dip).

I heard this called "Coasian" economics (as in Coase). I'm not sure what that actually means, though.

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

#332

Post by smallmancontrov »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #327
smallmancontrov wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your brokerage account is large enough that most of your change-in-net-worth happens in unrealized capital gains, your tax rate is 0%. That's pathological at the best of times and in a "capital wins" scenario it's positively thermonuclear.

Folks like to hate on capital gains tax. I think it's perceived as a rich-person deal. But homeowners, do they get taxed each year on the increase in value of their house? Almost the same thing, but not hated on the same way.

Homeowners get taxed every year on the value of their property. Let's do that to stocks, too.

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

#334

Post by zozbot234 »

doener wrote: post #184

No, 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.

This is a bad deal. Capital makes the marginal worker more productive, not less. You can tax the worker and she will still be better off than if you had taxed the capital, due to greater productivity. (This argument also applies to AI, of course. Since AI doesn't just instantly wipe out all jobs, there will be many workers that will benefit from it and will thus be quite able to fund their governments and social systems.) If you wish to tax some forms of "capital", or rather assets, you should focus on pure rent-generating assets like valuable urban land, or local exclusivity rights to parts of the EM spectrum.

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

#335

Post by CrazyStat »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #291
Armisael16 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should productivity and corporate tax rates be correlated at all, up or down? The link there is not obvious.

Insofar as productivity is a sign of the system getting imbalanced towards capital, the system should be pushed back and the everyman thrown a bone.

To what extent is productivity a sign of the system getting imbalanced towards capital? That relationship is not at all clear to me.

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

#336

Post by Treegarden »

harperlee wrote: post #187
doener wrote: post #184

No, 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…

This is not an easy question. It seemingly boils down to: what are fair ways to extract value from citizens for the shared value of the state?

However, the root questions are: what should the state provide, how much, and of what nature? A secondary question then becomes how important the redistributive aspect is. That’s what you’re seemingly alluding to when you say: people work, get taxed on it, but others automate that work and this automation does not get taxed.

Following that line of thinking makes sense, but it also contradicts the core benefit of automation, which is to delete non-needed work, make things cheaper, and make the value creator richer.

If the goal of redistribution is usually that “more” people reach a higher standard of living, then adding taxes and friction to processes like automation may conflict with that goal, given that automation is arguably one of the strongest natural drivers of higher living standards overall.

Of course, the counterpoint to “what and how much should the state provide” is “who should pitch in, and how much,” which is what you’re focusing on. I mostly agree that everyone should be taxed fairly, but I also see many exemption cases, because taxes are friction and we often want certain things to be frictionless. For example, I would oppose taxes on life-saving surgeries. But where do you draw the line? What about automation that indirectly enables or improves life-saving surgery?

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

#337

Post by legacynl »

haizhung wrote: post #299
doener wrote: post #184

No, 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.

Very well put. I am working on tooling that will likely increase developer productivity by a large factor; and will most likely be used to lay off more developers as their labor is no longer required. I often ask myself whether that is ethical or not. But in the end, it’s not the tooling that’s unethical. Productivity increases are good for everyone, under normal circumstances. It’s the fact that all the gains are be…

> I often ask myself whether that is ethical or not. But in the end, it’s not the tooling that’s unethical. Productivity increases are good for everyone, under normal circumstances.

So if I'm reading your comment right, you think it would be ethical under normal circumstances, but also believe we don't live under those normal circumstances? In that case i think the answer you're looking for is: it is not ethical to develop these tools under the current circumstances.

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

#338

Post by smallmancontrov »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #281
avianlyric wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A capitalist system is built on the idea that holders of capital actually deploy that capital, rather than horde it. If capital holders don’t actually deploy that capital and compete with each other, then you don’t have a capitalist system anymore. You have a feudal system, where asset holders extract resources through rents, rather than capital deployment and risk taking.

Can you point me to the data showing how much capital is horded?

"Is the capital being deployed for rent seeking or for taking economically useful risks?" is a judgement call. You won't find it listed in a FRED time series.

When every industry is on a multi-decade streak of consolidation, when McDonalds is about land speculation rather than serving food, farming is about land ownership rather than growing food, airlines are about credit cards rather than transportation, it's not unreasonable to believe that a substantial amount of capital is being deployed towards rent-seeking rather than economically useful risk taking.

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

#339

Post by stego-tech »

Yes, just not in the “one bot = one taxpayer” sense.

Look, rich countries like the United States who have been obsessed with neoliberalism and laissez-faire Capitalism have spent the past fifty years continuously slashing tax rates on everything and everyone (but particularly on the wealthy and homeowners), leading to gargantuan debts and deficits. Re-ramping that taxation on labor now, when it can’t even afford core necessities due to wage stagnation and inflation via corporate greed, would be equivalent to lighting off fireworks while pumping gas: a very bad idea.

What’s needed isn’t a simple tax increase, but a fundamental rework of the tax scheme. When a majority of wealth is coming from Capital Gains (housing profits, investment returns, etc), then that’s where a majority of tax revenue should be coming from. That’s a more effective way of taxing AI and labor, provided you also rework structures to eliminate the myriad of loopholes people and businesses use to duck taxes on that income. You’d also need to rework incentive structures to limit the collapse of labor until such time as society and government can be reworked around a post-labor future: tax penalties for layoffs by profitable firms or firms who have a disproportionate amount of workforce on income-based government welfare programs, elimination of subsidies in profitable segments of the marketplace, stringent accountability standards for government contracts, labor protections in general, job guarantees, higher minimum wage, the list goes on and on.

What frustrates me is that these sorts of posts get trotted out as “big think” arguments about AI, when in reality they’re about thirty years late to the party and woefully unaware of the complexity and risks of the issue at hand. They want to debate hypothetical minutiae instead of acknowledge the present reality: that workers are being permanently displaced by AI now (or at least by AI investment), and that the big players, despite any public statements promoting or encouraging regulation of their industry or the need to help workers, are presently doing everything in their power to stop governments from addressing either of those things lest their expansion be curtailed.

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

#340

Post by robinhoode »

zozbot234 wrote: post #334
doener wrote: post #184

No, 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.

This is a bad deal. Capital makes the marginal worker more productive, not less. You can tax the worker and she will still be better off than if you had taxed the capital, due to greater productivity. (This argument also applies to AI, of course. Since AI doesn't just instantly wipe out all jobs, there will be many workers that will benefit from it and will thus be quite able to fund their governments and social syst…

> This is a bad deal. Capital makes the marginal worker more productive, not less.

Why should workers care about being more productive if they do not reap the rewards in terms of wages?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_of_wages_from_produ...

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