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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?

#411

Post by ragazzina »

jlawson wrote: post #395
dymk wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a matter of where you get your taxes from. Plenty of corporations can afford to pay a more fair share. And studies on basic income have so far shown it to be effective.

Studies on basic income have shown that it's harmful to the people who receive it. They report no improvements on any measured outcome. Not lower stress, not more education, not better health. They work a bit less but that doesn't help them or their kids. Over the long term it harms them because their productive skills, values, and emotional capacities atrophy away from lack of use.

> Studies on basic income have shown that it's harmful to the people who receive it.

That's extremely interesting, can you link such studies?

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

#413

Post by Joel_Mckay »

If a task involves zero workmanship, than the opportunity cost is near $0 anyway.

To be clear, LLM is not real "AI", not sustainable, and already losing money with every new user.

An imperfect mirror shows only the irrational what they wish to see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftBiNu0ZNU

I look forward to likely having a cluster of heavily discounted GPUs in a few years. =3

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

#414

Post by AndrewKemendo »

veunes wrote: post #257
dns_snek wrote: post #221

It feels really alien to discuss this in terms of "taxing AI", like an economic abstraction completely breaking down. Ultimately when you take automation to its logical conclusion we have people with needs and we have machines and automation capable of meeting those needs with minimal human labor. No matter how you try to resolve this economically, it should hold that if something can be produced with minimal human l…

The end game you're describing (abundance with minimal labor) only works socially if we deliberately redesign distribution, not just production

This is the only correct answer.

I believe unfortunately it’s intractable because humans cannot successfully align incentives and actions at a scale large enough required to solve it

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

#415

Post by [deleted] »

vjk800 wrote: post #344

Tractors largely replaced human labour in farming about a hundred years ago. Should we have started taxing tractors? I really have difficulties seeing AI as anything else than yet another type of machinery. If your argument is "but it's replacing ALMOST ALL human labour" - well, the same argument was valid for tractors a hundred years ago (when almost everyone was employed in agriculture).

[deleted]

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

#416

Post by zwnow »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #402
zwnow wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats the alternative? Kill off all humans replaced by AI unable to do something else for a living? Its sad enough that there are food stamps given the amount of food that regularly ends up in a dumpster on a daily basis. Humans come first, not machinery.

Nobody needs to kill anyone, people will just stop having kids which is what’s happening

Whats with the people already alive? If u continuously replace them with AI u need to support them in case of their inability to provide for themselves. Im afraid the worldwide available social security nets in place aren't made for withstanding this kind of unemployment.

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

#417

Post by [deleted] »

bko wrote: post #30
appreciatorBus wrote: post #17

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

Exactly. This is such a silly argument. The article takes the argument "if a lot of jobs disappeared since they are now done effectively for free, what about tax revenue??" It really misses the forrest from the trees. You're transported into a world in which efficiencies mean that much fewer people need to work, but somehow government services and entitlements are unchanged and we need to hit roughly the same percent…

[deleted]

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

#418

Post by slowmovintarget »

thunky wrote: post #368
slowmovintarget wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> where's my royalty check? I support the idea of UBI with zero conditions, but not this. You didn't get royalties before AI when someone was heavily influenced by your work/content and converted that into money. If you expected compensation, then you shouldn't have given away your work for free.

[flagged]

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

#419

Post by giancarlostoro »

vjk800 wrote: post #344

Tractors largely replaced human labour in farming about a hundred years ago. Should we have started taxing tractors? I really have difficulties seeing AI as anything else than yet another type of machinery. If your argument is "but it's replacing ALMOST ALL human labour" - well, the same argument was valid for tractors a hundred years ago (when almost everyone was employed in agriculture).

Pretty sure farmers don't buy them tax free? I'm sure they write some of the cost off, but they still foot the rest of the tax burden.

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

#420

Post by gwbas1c »

jlawson wrote: post #401
immibis wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wrong decision wasn't using productivity enhancers - it was building a society around the idea that everyone MUST have a job, even in the presence of substantial productivity enhancers which massively decrease the number of jobs. We've scraped by so far... so far.

The problem is that for the vast majority of people to be psychologically healthy they must have a job. This isn't a societal decision, it's a reality about how humans are. The alternative is like feeding an animal instead of letting it live the lifestyle it's adapted for. That helps it in the moment but over time its capacities atrophy and it ends up weakened, twisted and harmed with nothing to spend its natural ins…

> The problem is that for the vast majority of people to be psychologically healthy they must have a job. This isn't a societal decision, it's a reality about how humans are.

The "job" can be things like volunteering, artwork, finding a cause, inventing, raising children, teaching...

Work can be subsidized and based around personal interest and achieve the "psychologically healthy" aspect that you describe.

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