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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?

#761

Post by int_19h »

haizhung wrote: post #456
legacynl wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I often ask myself whether that is ethical or not. But in the end, it’s not the tooling that’s unethical. Productivity increases are good for everyone, under normal circumstances. So if I'm reading your comment right, you think it would be ethical under normal circumstances, but also believe we don't live under those normal circumstances? In that case i think the answer you're looking for is: it is not ethical to d…

Interesting take. Not that I disagree, but it’s interesting to see that on HN. Wouldn’t that mean that it’s unethical to work on anything that improves productivity? AI, in particular? As long as (almost) all the benefits/wealth generated by your work is captured by the 0.1%? Because that’s the case right now.

The problem isn't the benefits per se, it's that the downsides are shouldered by everyone else while the benefits accrue to 0.1%. At which point it's just stealing from the commons.

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

#762

Post by dzhiurgis »

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…

So the remaining 3 workers will be paying 100% of tax. Doesn’t seem fair to me.

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

#763

Post by thethimble »

ceejayoz wrote: post #741
jimbokun wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But you cannot seriously argue that capital owners "avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems". Sure we can. Peter Thiel managed to put $5 billion in his Roth IRA. https://www.propublica.org/article/billionaires-tax-avoidanc... "Using stock deals unavailable to most people, Thiel has taken a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall... What’s…

But this strategy is also eligible to you. Nothing is stopping you from turning your Roth IRA into a multi billion tax free gain.

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

#766

Post by int_19h »

philipallstar wrote: post #506
dymk wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Imagine a society that is halfway to that. So, say, there are only enough jobs for half of the people, but the rest still want to eat.

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

#767

Post by icedchai »

warkdarrior wrote: post #755
malfist wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should capital have a separate tax rate than people?

Also, if companies have rights like people do, then they and their shareholders should be taxed like people are.

You want to tax people twice?

Corporations pay taxes on profit. Shareholders pay taxes on dividends and capital gains.

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

#768

Post by ACCount37 »

ekidd wrote: post #437
lelandfe wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> technological unemployment is not something that will be sudden or obvious I already have friends experiencing technological unemployment. Programmers suddenly need backup plans. Several designers I know are changing careers. Not to mention, the voiceover artist profession will probably cease to exist besides this last batch of known voices. Writer, editor - these were dependable careers for friends, once. A friend…

> Programmers suddenly need backup plans. Yup, Claude Opus 4.5 + Claude Code feels like its teetering right on the edge of Jevon's Paradox. It can't work alone, and it needs human design and code review, if only to ensure it understands the problem and produces maintainable code. But it can build very credible drafts of entire features based on a couple of hours of planning, then I can spend a day reading closely and…

"Inadequate hardware" is a truly ridiculous myth. The universal robot problem was, and is, and always will be an AI problem.

Just take one long look at the kind of utter garbage human mind has to work with. It's a frame that, without a hideous amount of wetware doing data processing, can't even keep its own limbs tracked - because proprioreception is made of wet meat noise and integration error. Smartphones in 2010 shipped with better IMUs, and today's smartphones ship with better cameras.

Modern robot frames just have a different set of tradeoffs from the human body. They're well into "good enough" overall. But we are yet to make a general purpose AI that would be able to do "universal robot" things. We can't even do it in a sim with perfect sensors and actuators.

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

#769

Post by Terr_ »

ursAxZA wrote: post #158
Terr_ wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The merits of this particular proposal aside, it's tactically important to get the ideas out there and build consensus about "where we want to get to." Otherwise you're ceding control of the Overton window to the folks aiming for techno-serfdom.

I understand the need to seed future debates early. My hesitation comes from the fact that most proposals implicitly assume a “fixed physical capability” for AI systems — something we don’t actually have yet. In practice, social impact won’t be determined by abstractions but by power budgets, GPU throughput, reliability of autonomous systems, and years of real-world operation. If scaling hits physical or economic lim…

I think "tax AI" makes as little sense as "taxing Jacquard looms" or "taxing robot factory-arms"... Which are all part of a long-term trend, and attention to that trend is overdue, rather than premature.

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

#770

Post by rayiner »

mrguyorama wrote: post #740
nradov wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually real wages have increased a lot since the 70s if you count employer contributions to employee heath insurance. The problem is that a lot of that money is being wasted by an inefficient healthcare system, and employers probably shouldn't even be involved in sponsoring group health plans in the first place.

>if you count employer contributions to employee heath insurance You shouldn't. >and employers probably shouldn't even be involved in sponsoring group health plans in the first place. They are free to lobby for socialized medicine, but they don't because they like how the current system helps lock employees into bad jobs for any amount of healthcare.

If you're trying to understand changes in the share of income going to workers versus employers, then you must count those contributions. For the average family, employers pay $20,143 annually in premiums: https://www.kff.org/affordable-care-act/annual-family-premiu....

From the perspective of the employer, that's real money, no different than if they had paid the $20,143 directly to the employee as wages. It's not the employer's concern what happens to that money after they fork it over.

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