Should AI also pay rent, mortgage, healthcare insurance, auto insurance, etc? Whatever workers make goes to rent/mortgage/insurance. A tiny percentage of workers save for retirement. Now everyone becomes a 'retiree' without monthly allowance.
If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
441–450 of 1001 posts
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#442Tractors 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).
We did in a way. Tractors help produce more goods. Those goods incur VAT at the point of sale to consumers.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#443Tractors 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).
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…
>The same can probably be said for contemporary AI, but it's tough to tell right now. There's some scant indications we've scaled LLMs as far as they can go without another fundamental discovery similar to the attention paper in 2017. GPT-5 was underwhelming, and each new Claude Opus is an incremental improvement at best, still unable to execute an entire business idea from a single prompt. If we don't continue to see large leaps in capability like circa 2021-2022, then it can be argued jevons paradox will kick in here and at best LLMs will be a productivity multiplier for already experienced white collar workers - not a replacement for them.
The NBA has an incredibly high demand for 14-foot-tall basketball players, but none have shown up to apply. Similarly, if this causes our economy to increase demand for people to "execute an entire business ide from a single prompt", it does not mean unemployment can be alleviated by moving all the jobless into roles like that.
We don't need science fiction AI that will put everyone out of work for it to be ruinous. We only need half-assed AI good enough that they don't want to pay a burgerflipper to flip burgers anymore, and it'll all go to hell.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#444By this logic owners of wheel barrows should be taxed for all the manual labour jobs the wheel barrow destroyed.
The problem is that AI takes jobs faster than creating new ones.
That's unique in human history
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#445Tractors 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).
Tractors replaced a task in specific fields, farming, construction largely. AI seems to have the potential to cover more territory. The potential blast radius is greater.
Agricultural jobs accounted for more than 80% of the preindustrial workforce. Granted you still needed people to maintain the jobs and some roles weren't entirely replaced or replaceable. I wonder how the two compare. I will say that AI has the opportunity to affect many lines of work which makes it scary for many.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#446Tractors 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).
> when almost everyone was employed in agriculture
Employment was a product of the industrial revolution. In the age when most everyone worked in agriculture, they owned the farm operation.
We didn't tax the tractor to bail out failing small businesses then, and I strongly suspect there is no will to tax AI to bail out failing small businesses that might succumb to AI today either. The population generally doesn't like small businesses and is more than happy to see them fail.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#447Earlier 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 people who own the magical AIs won't decide that they want to keep us all as pets, we won't have leverage to demand that they keep us all as pets, and they will have the resources to make sure they no longer need to keep us as pets. Shouting "You should keep humans as pets" is unlikely to change this fundamental equation.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oh I get it, but I do find it silly, because that only means that the company running the models pay more in taxes for providing you with a service, which is weird to me. Especially if they keep costs down on goods and services, allowing us to focus on quality of output more. At least that's what Claude Code has done for my side projects.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#449No, 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 essence... Tax not paid by ultra wealthy goes back into he system as loans that extract interest that in turn is used to buy assets sold to pay for interest, those are then rented back to the system to extract more interest. In essence by allowing no tax to be paid by the ultra wealthy, we facilitate the death of the middle class and transfer of everything to the very few - with mathematical precision. Ultimately…
While I probably prefer a society that is more "for the many", I can't exclude the possibility that some people have different preferences and would not want to impose my opinion.
Considering this, everybody might have to make (at some point in their lives) hard choices regarding where they choose to live. Yes, one should fight to improve the society one is living in, but there is also a saying "only the fool persists in their folly" ...
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#450Tractors 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).
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