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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?

#471

Post by Gravityloss »

albumen wrote: post #370
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).

We didn’t tax tractors, but we did tax the expanded economy tractors enabled, and built institutions to manage the transition. Ex-farmhands had time to move into new jobs created by the Industrial Revolution, and it took decades. People also moved into knowledge work. What happens when AI takes all those jobs in far less time, with no other industries to offer employment? If AI makes a few people trillionaires while…

There is a scene of wealth transfer agent simulations. With some dynamics you easily end up in a situation where after enough transactions, all of the wealth is concentrated on one single agent. Think about "I am the state" but extended to the whole world. Billionaires trying to affect countries' elections seems child's play compared to that.

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

#472

Post by dymk »

philipallstar wrote: post #427
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.

If everything's automated then you don't need taxes to pay people.

Let me know when we live in The Culture, but I’ve got a feeling fully automated luxury gay space communism is a long ways off

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

#473

Post by torginus »

I had a stray thought - if all those 1%ers whose sons and daughters attend elite schools to become high powered barristers and other such elites, find that their kids no longer have career prospects, is it possible that we'll be hearing more about how exploitative the economy is, and how capitalism has failed the people?

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

#474

Post by jmyeet »

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.

It's hard to truly comprehend the damage Red Scare did to all of our collective lives. The Post-WW2 era utterly destroyed the labor movement and pretty much any form of collective action. And all but about 10,000 people are worse off for it.

So many commnents here, yours included, make perfect sense when you simply look at them through the lens of the workers' relationship to the means of production.

Automation could be a good thing. It could mean we need to do less work and have more leisure time. Instead it gets concentrated in the hands of very few so they can become even wealthier. And the resultant layoffs are used to extract free labor from the people who remain and suppress their wages, all to eke out more profits.

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

#475

Post by carlosjobim »

Teever wrote: post #65
bko wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You're transported into a world in which efficiencies mean that much fewer people need to work, It's a matter of perspective. I'm pretty sure that from their perspective those people very much need to work because they need to pay taxes, rent, insurance, food etc... What mechanism is going to ensure that the increased productivity is going to result in lower cost of living for these people such that they no longer…

> I'm pretty sure that from their perspective those people very much need to work because they need to pay taxes, rent, insurance, food etc...

That's a pretty Matrix "human-battery" level attitude to your fellow brothers and sisters. "They need to work to pay taxes, rent, and insurance". Ie, they only exist and are allowed to live to be serfs - or cattle really.

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

#476

Post by pjc50 »

ben_w wrote: post #222
pjc50 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody calls alcohol duty “micromanagement”. They don't, but it really is! There's different rates for different specific gravity and different processes. Re: petrol, I note that the UK government is trying to replace this as part of the EV transition with a milage tax, which is proving controversial and fiddly. Energy tax is a hugely fraught political issue. The "poster child" for cheap energy is a little old lady…

> I think I'd favor a "personal allowance" model similar to income tax, where you get the first X units of energy tax free and then have to pay VAT, carbon taxes etc. on the rest of it. I can see why this is tempting, but I think there's a better way to legislate with this, especially with that poster child. I'm a landlord of a flat. I used to live in it before I left the UK. The EPC rating is D, so despite the doubl…

I remember there was a pressure group "insulate britain". Their aggressive tactics got them banned and arrested, and the idea was never heard from again. I sometimes wonder if that wasn't the intended outcome, a low-temperature conspiracy theory.

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

#477

Post by carlosjobim »

bybuybye wrote: post #82
appreciatorBus wrote: post #17

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

Apples and oranges. Wheelbarrow is obviously limited in the types of tasks it can handle.

What about the wheel then? It's stolen plenty of jobs, not only from people, but from animals too.

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

#478

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

veunes wrote: post #244
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.

If AI really is just another capital amplifier, then the problem isn't new, AI just makes the existing imbalance harder to ignore

It removes a layer of abstraction from capital to production. With AI the only question is if the compute is available to purchase, once it is, you can produce with it.

Of course, the question then is who is consuming the production, but we're not quite there yet.

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

#479

Post by pjc50 »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #331
harperlee wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Ronald Coase. https://economics.com.au/2013/09/03/coasian-thinking/ ; more broadly he has some great writing on the "theory of the firm".
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