If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes? • Hacker News Board

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

#921

Post by dragonmost » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 6:21 AM UTC

welshwelsh wrote: post #643

fzeroracer wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How about the rich say that 50% of the economy should pay their fair share? How exactly do you propose that they pay their fair share when they literally do not have the money or assets to do so? Are you proposing modern day slavery? Perhaps people selling their family? I'm curious what happens if you take this line of thought to it's actual conclusion.

How about instead of taxes, we have a $10,000 per year subscription fee to live in society. Maybe different depending on area, like $20,000 a year to live in NYC but only $2,000 per year to live in a rural village. If you can't afford the fee that's OK, it just means you have to live outside of the developed areas and don't benefit from any services provided by the government. But you are free to set up a tent in the…

Would this mean that a person that makes 50k/y most pay 20% of their income while a billion$ company still pays 10k? I don't think this helps with wealth inequality.

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

#922

Post by BrenBarn » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 6:24 AM UTC

robocat wrote: post #860

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.

I'm actually receptive to this argument, but there are two problems. One is that we have no mechanism for implementing international policy of this sort even in theory (i.e., there is no jurisdiction with authority over both those to be taken from and those to be given to). The other is that, absent such a mechanism, most attempts to implement such transfers will likely increase inequality, because, for instance, the elites of whatever country we want to benefit will simply appropriate all the intended transfers. In other words there is no even remotely reliable way to convert, en masse, cars in my country to bicycles in a poor country somewhere else.

This makes it unwise to attempt to do such transfers on a large scale. That said, I would support something like a tax whose revenues are specifically directed towards improving the lives of much-worse-off people elsewhere in the world in ways that are carefully chosen so as to be less vulnerable to graft. (These would likely be in-kind benefits like latrine construction, etc., rather than monetary grants.)

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

#923

Post by solumunus » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 6:32 AM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #887

solumunus wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it’s not. It’s not inevitable that we get super intelligence, or even regular intelligence AGI. Even if we did, the cost of building, running and maintaining a robot to do manual jobs - I would argue this will never be cheaper than paying humans to do the same thing.

I didn't even mention AI though, but, really, you don't think automation or improved efficiencies will make human labor redundant? What about 30% unemployment, is even that feasible to you? Because that would also be catastrophic to the USA.

30% is feasible to me.

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

#924

Post by tossandthrow » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 6:54 AM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #833

tossandthrow wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One can’t spend any of the money until it becomes personal assets. The oldest trick in the book is to use unrealized gains as collateral for loans - we even have banks specializing in this. Oh, and the US has a law that erases the tax bill for dead people - you'd be stupid not to use this trick.

That defers the gains, but does not eliminate them. When the loan comes due, they have to sell assets to pay it back.

Did you skip over the last paragraph?

If you can defer the repayment of the loan until after death, capital gains are eliminated.

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

#925

Post by DoctorOetker » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 7:01 AM UTC

Suppose I work in a construction company, and I'm holding a power drill, drilling some necessary hole in a wall. I am certainly performing some work as I push the drill into the wall, I apply a force in the depth direction, and a distance is traveled, the product amounting to mechanical work. But it is also true that electrons are flowing, causing (rotational) torque, and a certain angle is travelled resulting in mechanical work, applied by electrons, effectively miniature temp workers, sent out by the electric utility power company, effectively an (electron) temp agency.

I suppose most of the taxes should be paid by the electric utility, since it did most of the work. /s

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

#926

Post by unsungNovelty » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 7:34 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #828

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…

> 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 payin…

My problem is when you automate, the benefits are not passed on to the entire chain of people involved even though we start the discussion with that. So what do we do?

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

#927

Post by dns_snek » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 7:35 AM UTC

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…

I'm not omitting anything, it's included. If the total sum of human labor required to produce food (which includes energy production and pollution mitigation) goes down by 90%, then the total sum of human labor required to buy food should go down by 90% as well.

My point is simply this: As automation advances, the vast majority of that value (e.g. 98%) should flow back to society. Right now it's being soaked up by capitalists. There should be a reward for improving efficiency but it should be sensible.

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

#928

Post by tenuousemphasis » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 8:17 AM UTC

dzhiurgis wrote: post #913

thethimble wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Borrowing against illiquid assets should be considered a taxable event. Seems like this would entirely fix the loophole.

You pay taxes when you are paying off your loan...

Really? What taxes?

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

#929

Post by tenuousemphasis » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 8:19 AM UTC

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.

There's nothing wrong with murder because you could also murder people.

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

#930

Post by tenuousemphasis » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 8:24 AM UTC

kiba wrote: post #635

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Capital makes the marginal worker more productive, not less. You can tax the worker and she will still be better off than if you had taxed the capital, due to greater productivity. Point one: higher productivity is not necessarily our goal. I could think of numerous industries that would make the world better if they did less work. Point two: There's a moral absurdity in taxing the wages earned by labor more heavil…

It's both. You don't want to tax capital and income. VAT and sale tax are a bad idea too, especially since they're regressive. So, what do you tax? You tax land and land-like things, non-reproducible privileges(like patents and copyright), pollution and other negative externality. Now, there's an argument to be made that we couldn't possibly be able to fund governments on the back of these taxes. Fair enough, but it…

VAT is not regressive.

https://taxfoundation.org/blog/value-added-tax-vat-progressi...