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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?

#851

Post by twodave »

AI may replace some workers, but it won't replace the worker. Rather it will augment the worker. Even in software, where people are acting like recent graduates are having the ladder pulled up from them, I think this is just a lack of imagination. The same arguments could have been made of IDEs, debuggers and StackOverflow, but the industry isn't stupid. It still recognizes the need to learn and mentor actual human contributors. Whether we're in some hype-laden cycle or not, this is the truth.

As a young software engineer with a lot to learn, I would have been better off with ChatGPT or Claude than I was with experts exchange, reading manuals and banging my head on the wall until something worked. Often the SDKs I had to work with were inconsistent, buggy or required unsafe/undocumented features to accomplish basic things. I would not categorize the time I spent struggling with those arcane tools as productive learning. It was just "shit we had to deal with" to do the job.

So today, if you are a young engineer feeling like you are way behind, feeling like an imposter, feeling like you can't catch up to the industry: welcome to the club. I've been doing this for 20 years and those feelings are never far away. Instead of trying to lean on LLMs as a crutch, though, use your imagination! The tools we have now are what make us so much more productive. Use them, but don't let them use you. If you are learning especially, write the code, and let the LLM critique your work. Otherwise, give the LLM problems and ask it how it would solve it, and learn about the concepts that come out. Treat it like a Google search that just works way better and (for now) has no ads.

It's literally the same argument as how to use IDEs. The more you understand what it's doing, the better you will be at your job.

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

#852

Post by jack_tripper »

jimbokun wrote: post #771
ASalazarMX wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a naive position. People hate to pay taxes, the more they have to pay, the more they avoid it. Megacorps openly hiding money in fiscal paradises are the tip of the iceberg. Companies, and individuals, at every level, try to pay as little as possible, becoming as creative as the methods their wealth can unlock. If billionaires (soon to be trillionaries) paid as much taxes as their wealth disparity compared to the…

Even with all that, top 1% of earners pay more than 40% of overall tax revenue in the US.

The likes of Musk and Bezos are not earners though. They don't get a salary. They pay nothing in taxes as long as they don't cash out their wealth.

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

#853

Post by MLgulabio »

integralid wrote: post #597
MLgulabio wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uncontrolled capitalism hasn't worked either. Controlled capitalism brought us were we are today: Huge inequality around the globe especially in 3th world countries like the USA and destruction of the whole ecosystem we live in. Communism didn't look great next to capitalism (east europe vs. west europe) but those people were also happy. My idea is not communism though, its a 'if you do beneficial things for society,…

>Communism didn't look great next to capitalism (east europe vs. west europe) but those people were also happy Which people were happy? Nobody hates communism more than Eastern Europeans. I don't know a single elderly (i.e. lived through communism) person in my country who doesn't hate communism. I think you have a rose tinted view of how communism worked out on Europe.

Plenty of people were 'content' enough and had a normalish childhood.

I don't want to romantesize it though.

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

#854

Post by zwnow »

overrun11 wrote: post #733
jarpschope wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed that has not happened: https://tinyurl.com/3dutardj

No that's just a really misleading graph. Most of the gap disappears once you include variable pay like benefits, overtime, bonuses, stock comp etc. See this explanation and corrected graph: https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/economic-synopses-6715/w...

I dont want benefits, overtime, bonuses, stock comp. I want cash. Money I have agency over.

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

#855

Post by AnthonyMouse »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #332
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Folks like to hate on capital gains tax. I think it's perceived as a rich-person deal. But homeowners, do they get taxed each year on the increase in value of their house? Almost the same thing, but not hated on the same way.

Homeowners get taxed every year on the value of their property. Let's do that to stocks, too.

> Homeowners get taxed every year on the value of their property. Let's do that to stocks, too.

Property tax is fairly regressive because everyone needs somewhere to live, property tax gets passed on as higher rents and living space generally scales sub-linearly with income. It's probably not something we should be emulating, especially if you're going to try to apply the same rules to small business owners.

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

#857

Post by tredre3 »

ori_b wrote: post #752
gwbas1c wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that for the vast majority of people to be psychologically healthy they must have a job. This isn't a societal decision, it's a reality about how humans are. The "job" can be things like volunteering, artwork, finding a cause, inventing, raising children, teaching... Work can be subsidized and based around personal interest and achieve the "psychologically healthy" aspect that you describe.

> volunteering Sure, I guess -- if you're not charging for your time, it's more efficient to use human labor than AI+robots. > inventing If we get working AI, humans will be unemployable at inventing useful things. > teaching There are already multiple startups trying to replace teachers in the classroom.

> If we get working AI, humans will be unemployable at inventing useful things.

The point you're responding to is that humans would be able to do it for personal fulfillment and thus preserve their mental health, not to be useful to someone else.

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

#858

Post by tredre3 »

nancyminusone wrote: post #426
jlawson wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that for the vast majority of people to be psychologically healthy they must have a job. This isn't a societal decision, it's a reality about how humans are. The alternative is like feeding an animal instead of letting it live the lifestyle it's adapted for. That helps it in the moment but over time its capacities atrophy and it ends up weakened, twisted and harmed with nothing to spend its natural ins…

This viewpoint seems to be at odds with the well documented human phenomenon of "retirement"

Your viewpoint is at odds with the well documented human phenomenon called "Retirement Syndrome".

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

#859

Post by NedF »

ashleyn wrote: post #366
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).

This argument hinges rather strongly on whether or not AI is going to create a broad, durable, and lasting unemployment effect. Tractors did not cause this phenomenon because jevons paradox kicked in and induced demand rendered the problem moot, or demand eventually exceeded what mere tractors were capable of doing for agricultural productivity. The same can probably be said for contemporary AI, but it's tough to tel…

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

#860

Post by robocat »

BrenBarn wrote: post #44

Why not just tax wealth at steeply progressive rates? If the robots result in increased wealth inequality, a wealth tax will counteract that. If not, then it means the introduction of robots led to more broadly-based benefits. Either way, I'm so sick and tired of people talking about the effect on GDP. GDP is a terrible way to measure anything remotely meaningful. GDP has gone up and up and things have gotten worse a…

> Why not just tax wealth at steeply progressive rates?

You likely live in a wealthy country - your wealth should be taken from you and given to a poorer country.

You don't deserve a car when there's people who don't have a bicycle.

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