Earlier quoted context omitted.
Roads should be (and are in many places) paid for with fuel excise taxes only. The more you drive, the more you pay.
Only if it’s not an electric car. Electric cars need to start paying somehow, too. I’m open to many options, especially including weight * miles driven or similar.
If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
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Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#52By 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…
But ok look at it this way... What is silly about taxing a sector that is undertaxed because the current system assumed income taxes?
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
If full AGI dreams are achieved and 80% of jobs disappear, leading to mass unemployment, then we need to do something to support the huge numbers of people that no longer have any income. Taxes to support a UBI program seem one solution. Or maybe the labor market can shift to find opportunities for humans that AI can't replace and we'd avoid the mass unemployment. But feels like we're a long way from that right now.
We have "disappeared" ~97% of jobs since the Industrial Revolution started, and no increased unemployment has materialized. Until you understand how something that counter intuitive happened, you should not speculate on how AI replacing current jobs will play out!
The Industrial Revolution mostly ate mechanical labor and created more 'thinking' and knowledge worker jobs closer to the top of the stack. AGI goes after the information / decision-making layer itself. And it's unclear how much remains once those are automated.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#54By this logic owners of wheel barrows should be taxed for all the manual labour jobs the wheel barrow destroyed.
I'm not so sure this argument is valid. The invention of the wheel barrow created new jobs in wheel barrow manufacturing and distribution. On the other hand, the promise/threat of AI seems to be the complete displacement of humans in many industries without creating alternative employment for the vast majority.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#55By this logic owners of wheel barrows should be taxed for all the manual labour jobs the wheel barrow destroyed.
I'm not so sure this argument is valid. The invention of the wheel barrow created new jobs in wheel barrow manufacturing and distribution. On the other hand, the promise/threat of AI seems to be the complete displacement of humans in many industries without creating alternative employment for the vast majority.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#56When I was young I imagined a future where nobody had to work because computers and robots could do it all.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not so sure this argument is valid. The invention of the wheel barrow created new jobs in wheel barrow manufacturing and distribution. On the other hand, the promise/threat of AI seems to be the complete displacement of humans in many industries without creating alternative employment for the vast majority.
Just to expand on this. The wheelbarrow increases the value of labor. It's not a good analogy.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#58By this logic owners of wheel barrows should be taxed for all the manual labour jobs the wheel barrow destroyed.
To some degree we already do. Corporations pay taxes. We, as a society, allow corporations to pull resources from the commons because the other side of it is that their existence provides a value through jobs and tax revenue and such. If the equation shifts such that the benefits dry up, but the downsides only increase, why should we allow that? The solution could be as simple as higher business taxes or as wild as u…
I am deeply sceptical of the idea that 99% of us are suddenly going to be idle any day now, so I think endless think pieces on what we should do when that day arrives are kind of pointless. But it is certainly obvious that if it did happen, we would have to reassess how we do stuff.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#59Why not just tax wealth at steeply progressive rates? If the robots result in increased wealth inequality, a wealth tax will counteract that. If not, then it means the introduction of robots led to more broadly-based benefits. Either way, I'm so sick and tired of people talking about the effect on GDP. GDP is a terrible way to measure anything remotely meaningful. GDP has gone up and up and things have gotten worse a…
Arguably the value of a publicly traded corporation can be known because it is being traded continually. [1] For a privately held corporation it's quite opaque. Right now, for instance, Open AI is estimated to be worth $500B and might IPO at $1T but for all we know it could be a smoking hole in the ground in two years. Should we charge them a big bill in 2025 and then have the investors asking for a refund in 2027 when the real value is revised down to negative? Owners of imagined wealth could face big bills that, in the end, they couldn't pay. [2]
There would certainly be an incentive to avoid the taxation by minimizing bubbliness which might be a good thing but administering it would be a nightmare and manipulating the system to hide wealth would become a national sport.
[1] ... but it could be wrong seen from a future viewpoint
[2] I spent a lot of time in the 2010s calling up people in financial services on the phone and talking on the phone and there was no phrase that struck more fear into them than "mark-to-market", I could hear the voices crackle and feel the flinch. A bank or other institution that is perfectly able to make all its obligations as they unfold over time could be nominally insolvent at times when the market fluctuations down but winds up OK in the end -- the kind of accounting it would take to make wealth taxation accurate might be the end of fractional reserve banking and send us back to the giant Bitcoins of the Yap islands.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not about logic. It’s about humanity. We are losing.
1. No, we are not losing. 2. If it was true that we were losing, then tax revenue would be the least of our worries.
2. I never said tax is the end all be all of the situation. It’s one attribute we can use to combat AI take over and wealth inequality in the face of a multitude of solutions that can be executed. It is not consistent with logic as shown by the wheel barrow example and I am saying it doesn’t need to be. Understand?