Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

english.elpais.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

671–680 of 1001 posts

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

#671

Post by IanCal »

9dev wrote: post #346
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…

You're completely omitting externalised cost, though. As it stands, all this production requires gargantuan amounts of energy that have to come from somewhere, and cause pollution and waste that must be accounted for. As long as these factors aren't solved—if they can be solved in the first place—either the prices for consumers or the manufacturing cost must reflect this, I don't see the increased degree automation a…

That has nothing to do with this, those are things that should still be solved at a much higher level of abstraction. Tax the energy, pollution, waste - those have problems regardless of what caused them.

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

#672

Post by jimbokun »

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…

What is the correct capital gains tax rate?

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

#673

Post by etothepii »

integralid wrote: post #556
etothepii wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really comes down to valuation. The unit of account for tax is the currency of the relevant sovereign. Most contracts for income are denominated in that unit of account, even if it is not there is often a highly liquid market (FX) between units of account. Most wealth is not stored in assets where the unit of account is that of the sovereign. This counts double for assets with a physical location. This isn't somet…

I don't get it. Can you explain in simpler terms? My understanding is that you say that taxing things denominated in a foreign currency is difficult? But why? I already pay taxes on my capital gains denominated in a foreign currency (for example dollars). There are official government exchange rates for tax reasons, published daily. I don't see anything to hand wave here, because there's no problem.

Apologies, in an attempt to be precise I have used convoluted language.

The point I'm trying to make is that assets such as land are not denominated in any currency and typically end up being held for such large amounts of time with such substantial transaction costs that's there would be a large cost involved in knowing what the value of the thing being taxed is.

If I pay you $100k, £100k or ¥100k we can use spot rates to work out how many € that is within much less than 1%.

If I own a piece of land how would you answer the question, "what should the value for taxation be?"

If you go with the last transaction price then this will have a substantial impact on properties that haven't been sold for a long time and encourage people to enter into transactions that look like sales but aren't (such a 999-year lease).

Leave it up to a government agency to decide and this agency will come under huge pressure to favour one type of activity over another. How do you value land owned by the government? What if that land is privatised? The UK's attempts to deal with this when it privatised BT completely destroyed the fibre to the premises industry in the UK for years.

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

#674

Post by golergka »

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.

Most of the capital is owned (through pension funds and then different investment funds) by completely ordinary people who put their completely ordinary savings into it and get completely ordinary pensions out of it.

So you are effectively suggesting to forcibly take their money from them and then give it back, but through a corrupt and bureaucratic system of the state.

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

#675

Post by mrwrong »

jimbokun wrote: post #670
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.

> Can we have a grown up discussion

starting your reply with an insult, great way to spark "grown up discussion"

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

#676

Post by jimbokun »

mike_hearn wrote: post #528
airstrike wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In the US we just cut taxes, increase spending, and borrow the deficit without a thought to how to pay it back.

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

#677

Post by orangecat »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #575
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 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.

If I run around town smashing windows with a rock, GDP goes up.

Not generally. Window repairmen get higher incomes, but the rest of the economy has less consumption and investment.

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

#678

Post by Timon3 »

talentedcoin wrote: post #629
andrei_says_ wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trials show that UBI is fantastic and does bring the best in people, lifting them from poverty and addiction, making them happier, healthier and better educated. It is awful for the extractive economy as employees are no longer desperate. Here’s a discussion with a historian who has done a lot of research on the topic https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/8de9u2/i_am_a_histori...

This is not true. Don't ask a historian, ask an economist: https://knowledge.insead.edu/economics-finance/universal-bas... With some exceptions, UBI generally doesn't seem to work.

Maybe I'm misreading this article, but where does it actually say that anything UBI-related failed? The titular "failure" of the experiment is apparently:

> While the Ontario’s Basic Income experiment was hardly the only one of its kind, it was the largest government-run experiment. It was also one of the few to be originally designed as a randomised clinical trial. Using administrative records, interviews and measures collected directly from participants, the pilot evaluation team was mandated to consider changes in participants’ food security, stress and anxiety, mental health, health and healthcare usage, housing stability, education and training, as well as employment and labour market participation. The results of the experiment were to be made public in 2020.

> However, in July 2018, the incoming government announced the cancellation of the pilot programme, with final payments to be made in March 2019. The newly elected legislators said that the programme was “a disincentive to get people back on track” and that they had heard from ministry staff that it did not help people become “independent contributors to the economy”. The move was decried by others as premature. Programme recipients asked the court to overturn the cancellation but were unsuccessful.

So according to the article, a new government decided to stop the experiment not based on the collected data, but on their political position and vibes. Is there any further failure described in the article?

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

#679

Post by caconym_ »

thunky wrote: post #368
slowmovintarget wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real issue should not be whether they're paying the government. The issue is whether they're paying us for taking the human content of the last two thousand years and baking it into their generators. How do we get royalties on this, like our share of the oil proceeds if we were citizens of Qatar? How do we trade our share of the contribution? There's twenty years of my posting on Reddit, Slashdot, HN, and other f…

> where's my royalty check? I support the idea of UBI with zero conditions, but not this. You didn't get royalties before AI when someone was heavily influenced by your work/content and converted that into money. If you expected compensation, then you shouldn't have given away your work for free.

> you shouldn't have given away your work for free.

Almost none of the original work I've ever posted online has been "given away for free", because it was protected by copyright law that AI companies are brazenly ignoring, except where they make huge deals with megacorporations (eg openai and disney) because they do in fact know what they're doing is not fair use. That's true whether or not I posted it in a context where I expected compensation.

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

#680

Post by SunshineTheCat »

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 top 1% of earners in the US pay 40% of all income taxes.

https://usafacts.org/articles/who-pays-the-most-income-tax/

Post reply on HN