GNU and BSD-licensed software code has replaced a measurable amount of codes, as various companies no longer need to duplicate effort - should GNU be taxed? How?
If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
521–530 of 1001 posts
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#522AI is not replacing workers. Companies are. Thus what about taxing company profits?
No additional tax is needed, instead just do fork them once they reached certain level. So, basically split each company once it overgrowth certain level of its revenue. This will allow more automation split more equally among more people. Basically, strong AI is a "one-man company" dream. Just do whatever needed to allow equal access to AI by every member of your society, and make founding new businesses quick and easy.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#523No, 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.
Is there any time in human history where this wasn't the case? Genuinely curious.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#524Tractors 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).
If something transformative is just coming in and threatens the economic flows that sustains your social model, it is worth asking the question of how the economic flows should be proactively updated moving forward.
The tractor created the middle class by giving more people access to jobs that paid better and provided more free time. It is yet to be proven who will benefit from the advancement of LLMs, but there is some consensus in the article that the large companies operating these LLMs will be. From there, proposing taxes on that additional profit doesn't seem ridiculous.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#525Just tax profits
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#526Tractors 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).
> Should we have started taxing tractors?
Tractors are taxed in Montana. We have a "business equipment tax" that works roughly like the tax on cars, but applies to assets that don't drive on the public highway such as tractors and other machinery. Republicans have waged a decades long campaign to reduce/abolish it though.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#527The answer is, no, just tax land value.
Henry George, and David Riccardo before him, figured that as productivity and thus wealth increases the value accrues to the land owners, not capital not labor.
This is because Land is the fundamental bottleneck of human activity, the core finite resource. And as everything else gets more productive, the land itself becomes more valuable.
So, yes, tax Land, and redistribute as a dividend to all citizens. After all, no one can be credited for building that Land.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a bad deal. Capital makes the marginal worker more productive, not less. You can tax the worker and she will still be better off than if you had taxed the capital, due to greater productivity. (This argument also applies to AI, of course. Since AI doesn't just instantly wipe out all jobs, there will be many workers that will benefit from it and will thus be quite able to fund their governments and social syst…
If your argument were true we should set taxes on capital to zero, which is quite obviously a bad idea.
No, that's been a common proposal from economists pretty much since people started examining how economies work. Some places do have a capital gains tax of zero. Switzerland is one of them, and Switzerland is economically more successful than the rest of Europe.
Tax is one of those issues where there are actually correct and incorrect answers, thanks to many hundreds of years of active experimentation and relatively simple/robust theory. But people ignore the correct answers for social reasons.
The correct answer on tax is:
1. Figure out how much money the state needs to supply the services that are in-scope for it to an acceptable level of quality.
2. Aim to raise that much in taxes.
3. Optimize deadweight costs. That is, configure taxes to minimize the level to which the activities being taxed are discouraged and driven either out of existence or abroad.
If you do this sort of thing then you get Georgeism, you get zero capital gains, I think you get zero taxes on businesses, and a bunch of other policies I can't remember right now. The results can be economically very efficient i.e. they make everyone better off. However, almost nowhere uses them because there's nothing in the above three items about social engineering, and governments use taxation largely as a tool of social engineering. And in particular to please leftist voters who use the tax system to penalize wealth for its own sake, and to reward groups of client voters. Many governments also have a lot of trouble defining what's in scope for them and then working backwards to needed tax revenues; they prefer to raise as much tax as they can manage without totally crushing their economies and then find ways to spend it.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
They’re referring to the comment that they’re replying to, which talks about capital gains tax in an entirely different context to how you referenced software ownership.
If a business invests in building an AI system, they now have an asset, and the value of the business reflects the fact the business owns that software asset now - if someone were to buy the business they would get the AI software and all its potential to monetize that asset in the future, so of course it has value. If its value grows beyond the value the business originally invested to acquire it, it is quite litera…
Yes, that’s how a software business works. The OP seemed to be talking about how we need to reform tax due to worker replacement. Everyone is talking past each other.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#530Earlier 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.
If productivity is increasing but not average salary, then by definition the additional wealth is being taken by the owners of capital.
No it’s not. If the increased productivity is realized by multiple industries, then they all compete on price and the price of their goods comes down. That means the consumers of the product capture the gains in productivity.
Farmers using machinery instead of labor has meant cheaper food for everyone, not rich farmers.