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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?

#571

Post by integralid »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #149
useumix wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Directly taxing AI is very hard. Imagine if a company had to pay taxes for every AI agent operating in the U.S. or the E.U. As if they were regular employees. Big corporations would simply move the AI agents to countries without taxes.

It's actually trivial. AI apis are pretty streamlined by now. Just slap a tax on processed tokens and you're guaranteed to reach every AI agent out there. It already happens everywhere with sales tax for normal products. Just treat tokens as the product and create an extra tax for it.

I don't think you responded to the main concern.

Let's say EU and US taxes AI tokens. India doesn't, so almost all prompting done by international companies now is outsourced to India, and still not taxed.

Or do you tax AI companies and tax tokens "at source"? Then, obviously, they either lose competition with foreign (let's say Chinese) companies that do the same but are not taxed, or more likely all AI companies move out of EU and US.

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

#572

Post by Salgat »

andsoitis wrote: post #549
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.

> The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems is Are you sure capital owners do not contribute to our states and financial systems? For instance, Jeff Bezos is worth $238 billion even though Amazon has a $2.6 trillion market cap. That's $2.4 trillion of value created for other shareholders plus trillions more for employees, customers, suppliers, gover…

> That's $2.4 trillion of value created for other shareholders plus trillions more for employees, customers, suppliers, governments, and other stakeholders.

That's not Bezos' doing alone, that's Bezos plus over a million workers that did that. If Bezos never existed in history, someone else would have filled in that market. We need to stop this myth that a few men alone create all this value and that without them we'd still be dragging plows through the mud for our farms.

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

#573

Post by andsoitis »

Zigurd wrote: post #570
thesmtsolver2 wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you are assuming there is a central benevolent dictator who can compute "Value" more accurately than millions of people collectively voting with their wallets.

If AGI is actually attainable, then, sure, planned economies will be more performant than market economies, especially for high value industrial captal equipment. No need for Gosplan to decide on your candy bars and craft breweries.

> If AGI is actually attainable, then, sure, planned economies will be more performant than market economies

What is the logic?

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

#574

Post by integralid »

tempfile wrote: post #161
useumix wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Directly taxing AI is very hard. Imagine if a company had to pay taxes for every AI agent operating in the U.S. or the E.U. As if they were regular employees. Big corporations would simply move the AI agents to countries without taxes.

Don't people give pretty much exactly this argument about all taxes?

Isn't this exactly what happens? There's a reason why most bigtech companies operating in EU are based on Ireland.

This is not a reason to stop taxing (i agree with most here that taxes should be higher), but to design taxes that can't be circumvented easily.

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

#575

Post by wizzwizz4 »

thesmtsolver2 wrote: post #561
elevatortrim wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming: 1. Value created for other shareholders is a good thing 2. $ "value" directly translates to actual resources or services 3. These employees and customers would not get the same or more value elsewhere if Amazon did not exist 4. This "value" created by Amazon is better compared to the alternative (such as more resources used locally instead of global trade)

Well, you are assuming there is a central benevolent dictator who can compute "Value" more accurately than millions of people collectively voting with their wallets.

If I run around town smashing windows with a rock, GDP goes up. Computing value more accurately than financial markets is not difficult: the bar is on the floor.

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

#576

Post by jayd16 »

jaccola wrote: post #90
jayd16 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is utterly backwards and your false statement leads to a completely wrong set of inferences. We don't let corporations do anything because they provide value through jobs and taxes. What company do you know that exists (beyond transiently) solely by paying taxes and employing people? Companies are an extension of the individual, they exist to make money for the individuals that own them so that those individuals…

Nothing you said is really in contradiction with what I said, you're just looking at the why from an individual standpoint.

All of what you said can be true and also others can and do decide to allow or disallow a group to exist.

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

#577

Post by jayd16 »

jaccola wrote: post #255
rimbo789 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations don’t provide goods or services: people inside them do. Corporations are a legal structure we allow to exist because it enables jobs and taxes. Corporations don’t have to exist; they are a creation of society and thus can - and I think obviously- should be changed

Not even remotely true; corporations as we would recognise them today pre-date the legal system as we would recognise it today (and have existed in just about every legal system since). Certain configurations of the corporation are described in our laws, e.g. "limited liability".

Allow to exist and creation are completely different.

Wolves predate towns but we choose to not allow them in towns.

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

#578

Post by Zigurd »

andsoitis wrote: post #573
Zigurd wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AGI is actually attainable, then, sure, planned economies will be more performant than market economies, especially for high value industrial captal equipment. No need for Gosplan to decide on your candy bars and craft breweries.

> If AGI is actually attainable, then, sure, planned economies will be more performant than market economies What is the logic?

Most of the definitions I've heard of AGI are that it outperforms humans at complex professional tasks. That would include capital allocation.

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

#579

Post by gortok »

andsoitis wrote: post #549
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.

> The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems is Are you sure capital owners do not contribute to our states and financial systems? For instance, Jeff Bezos is worth $238 billion even though Amazon has a $2.6 trillion market cap. That's $2.4 trillion of value created for other shareholders plus trillions more for employees, customers, suppliers, gover…

One thing to point out that is lost in these arguments of “they create value for the shareholders”.

Folks that own a vast amount of stock do not pay taxes on that stock. They own the shares, and they take out loans against those shares. At some point they rollover or pay off those loans by selling some shares, but the shares have increased in value significantly in that time, or they’ve been granted new shares.

When we say “ has created value for shareholders”, it’s said in a way that implies that somehow that wealth creation makes its way into the tax system by virtue of the fact the wealth was ‘created’. It does not.

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

#580

Post by Nasrudith »

amelius wrote: post #297
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.

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

That is the opposite of a problem - it emerges because we have tools that make things more efficient than just throwing toiling bodies at it. We had economies which were based upon it, it was called slavery. Capital compounding its gains through better capital is how we get progress. The presense or absense of the capital advantage is part of what separates third world wages from first world.

The industrial era problem isn't capital but that economies of scale encourage consolidation heavily and make running small business an even more uphill battle. There is at least a counterbalancing force of competitive pressure and antitrust to promote some splitting for innovation's sake as opposed to just one big stagnant monopoly winning out just because it is biggest.

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