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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?

#811

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

EGreg wrote: post #717
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.

I find it ironic that individual income tax is a thing in USA, but as soon as AI does the work, oh only the owner has to pay. As a libertarian, I find the whole requirement for workers to secure an accountant and file individual income taxes under threat of retaliation silly. Individuals should be free to engage in activities like working for an employer, taking care of their kids or aging parents, or having sex, wit…

>Taxes should be levied on companies and robots, not humans doing everyday things.

This is also a slippery slope. As slippery as taxing individuals, property etc.

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

#812

Post by malfist »

icedchai wrote: post #791
malfist wrote: post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Why not? We already get taxed multiple ways. I pay income tax and sales tax

Do I get a refund the next year when the stock drops due to an executive scandal?

No but you can use the loss to offset other gains. Just like you do today. There's nothing new there. Google tax loss harvesting

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

#813

Post by gamblor956 »

brap wrote: post #306

Nations that keep placing obstacles in the path of AI (e.g. taxes) will lose to nations that don't. Ask yourself if this is a race you're willing to lose

Nations that wholeheartedly embrace AI and destroy their economies won't survive very long when all of their citizens are out of work and too broke to afford food or housing.

The nations that survive will be the ones that control the use of AI.

And to be quite blunt, any comment that suggests that AI is relevant to more than a handful of jobs doesn't understand how the world actually works.

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

#814

Post by tt24 »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #753
tt24 wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This concept has been thoroughly debunked. Wages and productivity track each other very very well.

That has not been true since the early 70s. Increases in productivity are multiples of the increase in wages since then. World Economic Forum: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/11/productivity-workfor...

This is misinformation and has been debunked at length. The graph compares median wage to mean productivity which is nonsensical.

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

#815

Post by gamblor956 »

nradov wrote: post #738
paul7986 wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's a non sequitur. Just because something is dangerous doesn't mean that governments should be able to regulate it. Often the "cure" is worse than the disease and the last thing we need is more intrusive government power.

Just because something is dangerous doesn't mean that governments should be able to regulate it.

That is...literally the point of government...

If you meant, that something shouldn't be banned just because it is dangerous, most people would agree with you. But almost everyone would agree that regulation of dangerous things is essential.

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

#816

Post by mike_hearn »

int_19h wrote: post #713
mike_hearn wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Switzerland. It's an excellent example of a place without a capital gains tax, because it doesn't have one. I didn't say it doesn't have other taxes! The type of tax matters a lot. The reason capital gains taxes are bad is that they discourage investment, but investment is how you create wealth. "Creating wealth" is ultimately a synonym for creating material progress. Voters like progress, and so this is a…

Investment is not how you "create wealth". An actual worker somewhere performing their job is what creates wealth. Yet when that worker is paid for the wealth actually produce, we tax that heavily. So if you want to encourage productivity, regular income ought to be taxed higher than passive investment. The argument for low capital tax is that if it's high, the people with the capital - who, crucially, need someone e…

This is the kind of semantic argument about words that makes anything other than flat personal taxation an endless rabbit hole.

When people talk about wealth creation they mean the creation of new wealth. Filling potholes isn't normally described as wealth creation because it's sustaining activity. You can choose to define wealth creation differently, that's fine, but it makes the term useless because it'd become synonymous with any kind of work.

Additionally, there's no real world difference between investors and workers. The idea you can separate capital as a class of people from workers is a Marxist concept that doesn't make any sense outside that broken ideological framework. The classical example: if someone owns a food stall, are they capital or a worker? If they pick up that stall and cart it to a bigger town down the road, is the act of them hauling their cart along the road work or an investment? You could argue equally well both ways, which makes the distinction just a distraction.

> however high the capital gains tax is so long as the owner of capital in question still gets to pocket some of the wealth produced using it, they still have an incentive to continue

Not at all! This is the kind of weird prediction that false distinctions between capitalists vs workers causes. It's why Marxist economies always fail. Investment is work and it also requires taking a lot of risk. If you confiscate 99% of someone's ROI nobody is going to say oh well, at least I got 1%. They're going to give up investing at all because the act of making the investment not only took effort, but also meant they could have lost the whole shebang.

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

#817

Post by dmitrygr »

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.

  > capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social system
Say what now? So i've been paying cap gains tax like a chump while there is a "no thanks" option you're aware of? Please tell me where to tick that box.

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

#818

Post by [deleted] »

thethimble wrote: post #763
ceejayoz wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#819

Post by caconym_ »

thunky wrote: post #795
caconym_ wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. I just don't think the AI is doing anything differently than a human does. It "learns" and then "generates". As long as the "generates" part is actually connecting dots on its own and not just copy & pasting protected material then I don't see wh…

Conjecture on the functional similarities between LLMs and humans isn't relevant here, nor are sophomoric musings on the nature of originality in creative endeavors. LLMs are software products whose creation involves the unauthorized reproduction, storage, and transformation of countless copyright-protected works—all problematic, even if we ignore the potential for infringing outputs—and it is simple to argue that, as a commercial application whose creators openly tout their potential to displace human creators, LLMs fail all four fair use "tests".

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

#820

Post by MagicMoonlight »

n1b0m wrote: post #712
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.

Ultra-wealthy individuals legally minimise their tax liability by: Receiving a relatively low official salary (Bezos's Amazon salary was $81,840 for many years). Not receiving dividends, so the wealth remains in stock that is not taxed annually. Borrowing money against their stock holdings to fund their lifestyle. Loans are not considered income and are therefore not taxable, and the interest on the loans can sometim…

If you don’t receive income then it obviously shouldn’t be taxed. Otherwise you’d be taxed on owning a car or a house, despite not selling it.
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