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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?

#431

Post by badosu »

ivape wrote: post #276
dns_snek wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't discount the collective power and ingenuity of a few billion oppressed people.

It just took some guns to conquer South America. Flying drones with AI targeting will be too much for regular people. The rich will have access to this service. Give unto Caesar that which is his, and let God handle the rest. The base case for the inductive proof is alarming, and I can’t see it ending well.

A bit of a tangent, but the more complete reason depends on what civilization (Aztecs/Incas), the common factor is an extreme loss of life due to old world disease.

Additionally, for the projectile velocity at the time the gambeson-like garment the Aztecs had available was surprisingly effective.

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

#432

Post by vladms »

Gud wrote: post #394
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.

I could not agree more. Another fundamental problem is that the means of production are concentrated into the hands of a few.

Are they though? At least for AI/software the last 30 years were fantastic to have universal access to means of production (compilers, tools, operating systems, models, you name it).

I am more worried about the capability of people to use the free means of production (more precisely improve education) rather than the concentration.

Edit: and to remove any doubt, I do agree that taxation of capital is completely badly done now, but I do not think the capital is about owning the means of production but about the capital (effort) required to organize people to use the (mostly) free means of production.

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

#433

Post by madbiz »

yodsanklai wrote: post #353

Are we rediscovering Marx? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat

In German, this concept is called "Maschinensteuer" (machine tax) or "Wertschöpfungsabgabe" (value-added levy). Interestingly, there's no English version of this Wikipedia article: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wertsch%C3%B6pfungsabgabe

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

#434

Post by Analemma_ »

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.

What’s the alternative, if AI does turn out to be able to replace large swathes of the workforce? Just kill everyone?

You could ban it and then turn all existing employment into a makework jobs program, but this doesn’t seem sustainable: work you know is pointless is just as psychically corrosive, and in any event companies will just leave for less-regulated shores where AI is allowed.

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

#435

Post by lotsofpulp »

renewiltord wrote: post #377
ashleyn wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument hinges rather strongly on whether or not AI is going to create a broad, durable, and lasting unemployment effect. Tractors did not cause this phenomenon because jevons paradox kicked in and induced demand rendered the problem moot, or demand eventually exceeded what mere tractors were capable of doing for agricultural productivity. The same can probably be said for contemporary AI, but it's tough to tel…

Basic income doesn’t do anything. We already have food stamps and so on. The largest sector of US federal spending is health and social welfare. We’d have to end pretty much all those programs to run a minuscule basic income.

>The largest sector of US federal spending is health and social welfare.

On old people who can't or don't work.

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

#436

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

Does automation use generally pay taxes?

Should Amazon pay taxes for using factory robots in lieu of people?

Should fabric manufacturers pays taxes for using automated looms instead of hand weaving ?

Even if lawmakers wanted to tax AI, how would they do it? How do you measure the AI usage level at a company, or the number of workers it has displaced?

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

#437

Post by ekidd »

lelandfe wrote: post #408
ashleyn wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument hinges rather strongly on whether or not AI is going to create a broad, durable, and lasting unemployment effect. Tractors did not cause this phenomenon because jevons paradox kicked in and induced demand rendered the problem moot, or demand eventually exceeded what mere tractors were capable of doing for agricultural productivity. The same can probably be said for contemporary AI, but it's tough to tel…

> technological unemployment is not something that will be sudden or obvious I already have friends experiencing technological unemployment. Programmers suddenly need backup plans. Several designers I know are changing careers. Not to mention, the voiceover artist profession will probably cease to exist besides this last batch of known voices. Writer, editor - these were dependable careers for friends, once. A friend…

> Programmers suddenly need backup plans.

Yup, Claude Opus 4.5 + Claude Code feels like its teetering right on the edge of Jevon's Paradox. It can't work alone, and it needs human design and code review, if only to ensure it understands the problem and produces maintainable code. But it can build very credible drafts of entire features based on a couple of hours of planning, then I can spend a day reading closely and tweaking for quality. But the code? It's professional work, and I've worked with contractors who did a lot worse.

So right now? Opus 4.5 feels like an enormous productivity booster for existing developers (which may indirectly create unemployment or increase the demand for software enough to create jobs), but it can't work on large projects on an ongoing basis without a knowledgeable human. So it's more like a tractor than anything else: It might cause programmer unemployment, but eh, life happens.

But I can increasingly see that it would only take about one more breakthrough, and next gen AI models might make enormous categories of human intellectual labor about as obsolete as the buggy whip. If you could get a Stanford grad for a couple of dollars an hour, what would the humans actually do? (Manual labor will be replaced slower. Rod Brooks from the MIT AI Lab had a long article recently on state of robotics, and it sounds like they are still heavily handicapped by inadequate hardware: https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex... )

Jevon's Paradox and comparative advantage won't protect you forever if you effectively create a "competitor species" with better price-performance across the board. That's what happened to the chimps and Homo neanderthalensis. And they didn't exactly see a lot of economic benefits from the rise of Homo sapiens, you know?

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

#438

Post by jasode »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #419
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.

>Pretty sure farmers don't buy them tax free? [...], but they still foot the rest of the tax burden.

To clarify, this isn't about the farmer paying a "sales tax" or VAT as % of the price of buying the tractor.

The article is talking about something else: paying additional machine taxes to cover the loss of unemployed crop workers that would have been paying individual income taxes.

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

#439

Post by sdf4j »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #436

Does automation use generally pay taxes? Should Amazon pay taxes for using factory robots in lieu of people? Should fabric manufacturers pays taxes for using automated looms instead of hand weaving ? Even if lawmakers wanted to tax AI, how would they do it? How do you measure the AI usage level at a company, or the number of workers it has displaced?

That's what Bill Gates proposed [0].

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-wants-tax-robots-2...

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

#440

Post by Uehreka »

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).

These two waves of automation are fundamentally different and shouldn’t be compared.

We got lucky that when farming was being mechanized, it happened slowly and while manufacturing was still growing and could soak up the labor. When manufacturing was offshored/automated, we got less lucky and a lot of people faced a massive drop in quality of life as they lost their high paying jobs and couldn’t find equivalent ones in the service sector.

Now we’re seeing a potential massive job displacement, the force doing the displacing can likely also do many of the new jobs that may arise, and the change is happening faster than any ever before.

Capitalism doesn’t promise to create new jobs when old ones are automated, we’ve just gotten lucky in the past, and our luck has run out.

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