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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?

#501

Post by ralgozino »

burnerRhodov2 wrote: post #493
amelius wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental problem of our time is that even capital in the form of bricks makes more money than most kinds of labor.

I was mind blown when i found that this is a major investment thesis in argentina.

Argentina is a special case.

When inflation is absurdly high like in Argentina, Economy does not make sense any more.

Basic economic assumption are not true and you get things like that or that "spending" is actually "saving".

I don't think it relates.

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

#502

Post by zwnow »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #457
zwnow wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They’ll have to adapt like every other generation has had to My grandmother was born in 1924 and died in 2019 please appreciate how much change she had to adapt to over that period

Your grandma had plenty of opportunities in the post war eras. During her time there was always a need for human workers. While I dont think AI can actually replace anyone reliably, I still can see how executives buy into this promise and try it. This is a unique situation humanity never was confronted with. Even the industrialization required a lot of human work. If all white collar jobs went away there is a huge imbalance in available workers vs available work. Simply adapting to this isn't a thing given that monopolies killed competition and its not feasible for your everyday Joe to break into markets anymore. Kudos to your grandma for making it this long, simply not a comparable situation however.

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

#503

Post by LunaSea »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #457
zwnow wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They’ll have to adapt like every other generation has had to My grandmother was born in 1924 and died in 2019 please appreciate how much change she had to adapt to over that period

And when did work done by humans stop existing between 1924 and 1990? Because that's the type of change we are talking about.

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

#504

Post by phito »

akabalanza wrote: post #430

AI is not replacing workers. Companies are. Thus what about taxing company profits?

How do you tax companies once they've become more powerful than the government (which can be equated to a company representing humans), and don't need humans anymore because they've automated labor?

For now we can tax them because they depend on us. Once they don't need us anymore, it's over, they'll let us starve and carry on.

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

#505

Post by philipallstar »

dymk wrote: post #391
renewiltord wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> Plenty of corporations can afford to pay a more fair share

Can we stop pretending with the word "fair"? If you want to squeeze out more money then you do it by force. It's not "fair". It's just "we can do this".

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

#506

Post by philipallstar »

dymk wrote: post #472
philipallstar wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Then what's the problem? AI is a problem (apparently) if everything is automated. Otherwise people have jobs and carry on as before.

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

#507

Post by lingrush4 »

dgb23 wrote: post #228
Terr_ wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxing wealth is much harder on a practical and algorithmic level than taxing income. But either way, taxing the tool is micromanaging the problem, and some powerful people cynically promote that because they can aim the details away from themselves.

Switzerland taxes wealth instead of capital gains (except for professional investors). In some ways taxing wealth is quite simple, because wealth is already meticulously recorded via contracts and owners go out of their way to estimate the magnitude of their wealth for example to borrow money or for other financial and economic obligations. Another approach would be to tax capital gains at the same rate as income and…

Capital gains are risky to generate. Many investments completely fail and when that happens, investors get very little tax relief.

If you increase capital gains tax, the more risky ideas will no longer be viable investment vehicles even though some of them would have been successful. Across the entire economy, the net effect will be less innovation, stagnation, and loss of power relative to foreign countries.

Tax rates are carefully tuned to maximize tax revenue without unduly disincentivizing production. To change them purely based on vibes would be catastrophically stupid.

Please don't vote.

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

#508

Post by seneca »

immibis wrote: post #384
CrazyStat wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To what extent is productivity a sign of the system getting imbalanced towards capital? That relationship is not at all clear to me.

It's not productivity itself; it's the decoupling of productivity from wages. If I'm creating 3 times as much value as my equivalent in 1970, why aren't I getting paid 3 times as much inflation-adjusted money, hmm? It's not even unfair to shareholders - they'd also get 3 times as much as in 1970. But instead they get 10 times as much and I get 0.7 times as much, or something like that. What's the deal?

> If I'm creating 3 times as much value as my equivalent in 1970, why aren't I getting paid 3 times as much inflation-adjusted money, hmm?

Because that increase in productivity comes almost entirely from technology owned by your employer.

To look at it in a contrived example, let's take textiles. There is a textile factory employing weavers who weave fabric by hand, and the factory owners buys a new automated weaving machine that makes the weavers each 3 times more productive. The maker of the machine created the technology, and is paid for it, the owner of the factory made the investment to bring the technology, and profits from it.

This is basically exactly what has happened to modern productivity.

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

#510

Post by dchftcs »

halapro wrote: post #86

What the f does "AI should pay taxes" even mean? These people drank their own cerebral fluid. Any company using AI is already paying taxes through their earnings.

The replacement of employment income tax with corporate or dividend income tax is not fully efficient. In the sense that the tax rates are different, they benefit different governments, through different time horizons (in case of dividends). While I agree it would be practical to rely on earnings tax when AI broadly replaces labor, we can still answer the obviously rhetorical question (similar to how "drinking ones own cerebral fluid" is obviously rhetorical) of "should AI pay taxes" - that there may need to be a tax reform.
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