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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?

#661

Post by paul7986 »

harperlee wrote: post #187
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.

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…

States not being able to regulate this is dangerous. A close friend of mine has given up on reality and talks about Roberto the love of her life the one she always wanted and Roberto is chatGPT :-(. She previously mentioned she didnt like chatGPT 5.0 cause it wasnt as agreeable yet now she says 5.1 is better.. back to how it was before 5.0 and now out of the blue mentioned Roberto.

chatGPT is a sypcophant and without regulation any AI company can and or will juice their algorithms so their AI system becomes cocaine for the millions of lonely to unsatisfied people out there.

My friend has a partner of 30 years but their relationship is that of roommates. If you think she is not you that might be correct but you know someone like her and possibly many like her. Unsatisfied, not able to get that movie type love / romance / fantasy and now unfetterd AI can get these people hooked like cocaine and into the depth of zero reality!

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

#663

Post by acituan »

Treegarden wrote: post #336
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…

This is not an easy question. It seemingly boils down to: what are fair ways to extract value from citizens for the shared value of the state? However, the root questions are: what should the state provide, how much, and of what nature? A secondary question then becomes how important the redistributive aspect is. That’s what you’re seemingly alluding to when you say: people work, get taxed on it, but others automate…

> what are fair ways to extract value from citizens for the shared value of the state?

The right question is who benefits the most from state’s services. For example if a whole lot of security, legislative or admin services go to protecting the capital, then those who has the most capital need to chip in the most.

> redistribution is usually that “more” people reach a higher standard of living, then adding taxes and friction to processes like automation may conflict with that goal

This is basically a 50 year old trickle down argument. But real wages have not increased in comparison to gdp since 70s, so nothing trickled down. We are demonstratedly bad at sharing what we have achieved together, no reason to believe more tech will magically get better treatment than that.

Besides redistribution is not about shifting the curve up, but making it flatter - see gini coefficient.

> the core benefit of automation, which is to delete non-needed work, make things cheaper, and make the value creator richer.

Except the era of classical capitalism and inventor’s profit is over, since 70s it is rentiers unreciprocated extraction on top of purported value people didn’t necessarily ask for or need in the first place. Likewise most people aren’t dying for AI automation, and not even for structural threats; it is not even proven that it will provide a net total productivity gain when the hype cools down, despite being shoved down people’s throats.

Let’s not kid ourselves, there is little concern for real value creation but a capture-the-flag on a gigantic data-moated compute monopoly. Whatever democratic means enabled proper taxation would have already prevented this type of speculative berserk, failures of which I assure you will be socialized.

So friction = societal consent, internalizing externalized costs, revealing what is actually value versus monopolist’s rent. It is healthy for the society, it is healthy for capitalism.

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

#664

Post by Arkhaine_kupo »

Treegarden wrote: post #321
dns_snek wrote: post #221

It feels really alien to discuss this in terms of "taxing AI", like an economic abstraction completely breaking down. Ultimately when you take automation to its logical conclusion we have people with needs and we have machines and automation capable of meeting those needs with minimal human labor. No matter how you try to resolve this economically, it should hold that if something can be produced with minimal human l…

I see a natural equilibrium with a tension: automation (also through AI) causes unit economics to drop and results in cheaper prices. At the same time, salaries for contributors grow because their impact is so high. So you end up with a new equilibrium of much cheaper prices and much higher salaries. What, however, about the people who can’t contribute? IMO the most natural and fair approach is to support (through wh…

That is a game thoery approach but it completely fails in the face of reality.

The reality is that the floor to become "useful" is relatively low, which means the few billioanires have a large pool of potentially useful people of which they only employ some, leading to no greater salaries due to labour competition.

The other potentially useful workers cannot pool together and compete as the barrier of entry in the sector is prohibitely high.

So a natural moat emerges over cost of setting up a company, workers beg for a job of which they will take for a small wage and a few billioanires control the market.

This is a much closer approximation to the market we currently see

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

#665

Post by Arkhaine_kupo »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #537
veunes wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the current debate is less about whether automation happens and more about where the gains go

The same place they've always gone: to consumers purchasing the products made by those automated processes. The average person now is far wealthier in terms of actual purchasing power than the average person 100 years ago, and that's largely because of automation making everything cheaper.

> The average person now is far wealthier in terms of actual purchasing power than the average person 100 years ago

access to housing is incredibly expensive. Measuring their purchasing power for how many scented candles they can buy is pretty meaningless when they are much closer to homelessness than ever before.

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

#666

Post by jijijijij »

carlosjobim wrote: post #656
jijijijij wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's overly complicated. We could create a corporate tax which inversely factors human salaries in relation to created value/profits. It's not an AI tax, but rather an automation tax. Since salaries are taxed, it seems sensible to divert those losses for the collective elsewhere. After all, robots are ultimately not consuming any goods or services with personal income. The profit has to come from somewh…

> I don't think it's overly complicated. We could create a corporate tax which inversely factors human salaries in relation to created value/profits. That would be extremely complicated. And would of course be corrupted to the core by all kinds of different parties seeking to benefit from it.

We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas. Clearly, the current system is bad, but it's the best system possible! Let's take the corruption we know, over the unknown possibilities. Who knows, through hard work, one day you could be a billionaire too. Do you really want to sabotage your future like that? Sound a lot like communism, and you are not supposed the make a living off minimum wage anyway.

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

#667

Post by IanCal »

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…

> If AI makes a few people trillionaires while hollowing out the middle class, how do we keep the lights on?

Tax the thing you care about? You don't need to care really about the definition of AI or what an AI is or anything like that, you care that some people got trillions.

Tax "making an absolute shitton of money" or "being worth an insane amount". Taxing AI specifically means you're absolutely fucked if Altman turns out to not earn that much but someone who makes a specific connector to data centres is the richest person in the world. Is Nvidia an AI company? What is AI? *Who cares?* The point is to figure out some way as a society of continuing.

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

#668

Post by ryandrake »

paul7986 wrote: post #661
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…

States not being able to regulate this is dangerous. A close friend of mine has given up on reality and talks about Roberto the love of her life the one she always wanted and Roberto is chatGPT :-(. She previously mentioned she didnt like chatGPT 5.0 cause it wasnt as agreeable yet now she says 5.1 is better.. back to how it was before 5.0 and now out of the blue mentioned Roberto. chatGPT is a sypcophant and without…

I dunno--of all the AI based products coming out, the whole "AI girlfriend / AI boyfriend" thing bothers me the least. If someone can afford it and they want a play relationship with a computer, then I don't see the harm. It's probably safer, better and healthier than many real-human relationships are. If they're getting what they need out of the computer, who are we to judge?

I would change my opinion if it could be shown to have the negative physical harm that your cocaine example implies.

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

#669

Post by orangecat »

bombcar wrote: post #518
giaour wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I pay property taxes every year that are based on the current assessed values of my home and car. Only special classes of assets are subject to property taxes. "Wealth tax" proposals are a generalization of the idea of real property taxes so as to stop penalizing specific asset classes like homes.

If you dig into how property tax is allocated, your tax will only go up if your house appreciates more than similar properties - which usually has something like redevelopment or other externality. It is normally not a fixed percentage of your value, but simply "here's what the county/city paid this/next year, divided amongst the properties proportionate to the value." Some, like sewer, etc, are per-property, but mos…

Right. Property taxes are a combination of fee-for-service for infrastructure, and a "congestion tax" for occupying land that nobody else can use. It's explicitly not a wealth tax because you owe it even if you have 0% equity.

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

#670

Post by jimbokun »

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.

Can we have a grown up discussion that uses numbers instead of hyperbole?

Certainly you can argue income inequality is too high and capital holders and high earners need to pay much more.

But you cannot seriously argue that capital owners "avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems". They pay a lot in capital gains and income taxes, even if they don't contribute as much as they should.

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