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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?

#821

Post by UltraSane »

llsf wrote: post #804
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…

What if I build and manage a dark factory ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing) ) and it produces gizmos. Since all my competitors are also running dark factories, we compete essentially on source materials + energy (assuming we have similar design/quality). Margin would be eventually razor thin. The dark factory does not make much capital gains, even as it produces 1,000 gizmo per second. The ca…

Who buys what you make if you need no employees?

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

#822

Post by mike_hearn »

drdec wrote: post #735
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…

Isn't a wealth tax just an expanded capital gains tax? If last year I had wealth X and this year I have wealth X+Y, I have to pay a wealth tax on the gains, in addition to the the tax on the amount I had previously. So my gains are still taxed.

The big differences are:

- Wealth tax is much lower, think a percent of your wealth or less vs 20% of your gains.

- You can avoid wealth tax by spending. If you sell a bunch of shares to earn $100k then take a year off to see the world, you pay no tax on that (other than sales taxes etc).

- In practice a lot of things aren't covered by wealth tax. If you spend on a fancy new TV it's not measured. Only the big ticket items are wealth taxed (houses, financial assets, art, cash piles, etc).

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

#823

Post by mike_hearn »

kiba wrote: post #696
mike_hearn wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood this Georgist argument. The richest people in the world today require very little land. Remote working is easily possible and plenty of companies use it, even if managers don't always like it. This feels like a medieval perspective.

Georgists aren't frozen in time, nor had they ever been limited to just taxing "land". We consider any economic "land" fair game. We even discussed network effects that allow companies like instagram retain a monopoly. In any case, California are where some of the most powerful tech monopoly are located, and not coincidentally it's also where some of the most expensive land there is.

So you define land to include stuff like copyrights and patents too? What counts as economic land?

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

#824

Post by IanCal »

9dev wrote: post #730
IanCal wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point I am making is that the reason artefacts of highly automated production (even with minimal human labor required) will never become accessible for very low human labor, because all that automation has its own cost. We can externalise that as long as possible and defer the bill to somewhere or someone else, but it will have to be paid eventually. > […] those are things that should still be solved at a much hi…

> The point I am making is that the reason artefacts of highly automated production (even with minimal human labor required) will never become accessible for very low human labor, because all that automation has its own cost

While I'm not sure I agree, this is not solved by tackling things at a low level and should be done at a higher level of abstraction - that's what they were saying.

> don't think that makes much sense. If a data center consumes all available electricity in a given municipality, it may provide AI services at a very low cost, but thereby makes the region uninhabitable.

If the data center was providing streaming services would you want to manage that differently? Imagine you had a data center that solved some user problem X, and another one that solves the same problem. Data center A uses AI, B does not but uses more power. Would you want to tax B less? Given what you've said so far I'd assume the answer is no - you'd want to tax that more because it's not really the AI part you care about, it's the power usage/emissions/local impact/externality X you want to avoid.

> I agree that it's a systemic issue that must be addressed holistically, but the actual solutions have to be implemented at all levels of the production chain.

Actually the more abstract sometimes the fewer places you have to deal with it. You don't have to figure out what cars everyone has, the specific MPG of each, driving patterns, how far your delivery driver went, whether they had other packages, etc - you can tax gasoline. This automatically flows through and avoids lots of wrangling about details and loopholes.

> Currently, we often pick the latter option, because it usually has the better profit margin.

Yes - and this drive makes it hard to manage when you put very precise rules around it. Tax AI and watch things rebrand as whatever falls just outside the limits of AI. See how products are built, deconstructed and remade exactly based on specific tariffs. Ford used to ship vans with windows and seats installed, then take them out again after they arrived!

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

#825

Post by haroldp »

UltraSane wrote: post #821
llsf wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I build and manage a dark factory ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing) ) and it produces gizmos. Since all my competitors are also running dark factories, we compete essentially on source materials + energy (assuming we have similar design/quality). Margin would be eventually razor thin. The dark factory does not make much capital gains, even as it produces 1,000 gizmo per second. The ca…

Who buys what you make if you need no employees?

Now that jacquard loom has left so many textile workers unemployed?

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

#826

Post by bcrosby95 »

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.

Damn, I knew when I picked "not billionaire" I would regret it.

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

#827

Post by lenerdenator »

overrun11 wrote: post #605
lenerdenator wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to speak for the other poster but I didn't see any implication of a central benevolent dictator in their comment.

It's implicit. Amazon has billions of dollars because customers freely handed over the money. We know they found the service valuable because they wouldn't have done so otherwise. The poster is suggesting there is some _true_ value separate from what these customers who know their own situations best think. That they are secretly being fleeced and a central planner will somehow better allocate the resources.

>It's implicit

Not at all. What if it were an employee co-op?

"The ultra-wealthy should have less power" != "We should implement a five-year plan for our command economy as thought up by glorious and correct Party."

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

#828

Post by AnthonyMouse »

llsf wrote: post #804
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…

What if I build and manage a dark factory ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing) ) and it produces gizmos. Since all my competitors are also running dark factories, we compete essentially on source materials + energy (assuming we have similar design/quality). Margin would be eventually razor thin. The dark factory does not make much capital gains, even as it produces 1,000 gizmo per second. The ca…

> The dark factory does not make much capital gains, even as it produces 1,000 gizmo per second.

But that's good, right? It means that the difference between what workers get paid when they do work and what they pay when they buy things is small.

> Sure the 4,995 unemployed might be able to afford the gizmo, but the state does not receive the same taxes. So what happens to those 4,995 unemployed people ? who is paying for their health benefits and social security (retirement) ?

Let's consider the two possibilities here.

The first is that we automate everything. This is implausible, but let's consider what would happen. Well then necessities would be free, because there is no labor cost to produce arbitrarily many solar panels or skyscrapers or mine asteroids to get unlimited raw materials etc. So then you don't need taxes because nothing costs anything.

The second is that there is still work you need people to do, and then they do that, and still have jobs.

And the more stuff you do automate, the less expensive it is to produce things, and the less assistance anyone needs to afford the now-lower cost of necessities. So if you get halfway between one and two then that's still fine because costs go down in proportion to the lower demand for labor.

The real problem is if the cost of necessities are held artificially scarce through regulatory capture and zoning rules. But that's not an automation problem, that's a government problem.

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

#829

Post by AnthonyMouse »

njarboe wrote: post #548
Treegarden wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

'taxed fairly' This could be almost any tax system depending on the what one views as "fair".

Nah, you could reasonably regard a tax system where everybody pays <2% of their income in tax as fair and likewise one where everybody pays 50%, but there is no way to call a system fair where ordinary working people pay higher effective rates than multinational corporations.

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

#830

Post by mips_avatar »

It's important in a democracy for people to pay taxes, it includes them in the system in a way that doesn't exist in a place like Saudi Arabia. We shouldn't aim for a bread and circuses society, but for one where we aggressively commoditize technology for the benefit of everyone.
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