No obviously not. Lots of machines replace workers.
Why would taking scarce resources away from productive businesses and allocating to unproductive things be good for anyone other than government bureaucrats?
Depends on whether they intend to let all of these out of work people who were unlucky enough to be born as a worker starve to death really. They are going to have to find a way to give people a life even if there are no jobs or the paperclip creation doesn't have any buyers. Anyone proposing to just leave a decent percentage of the country to just die is going to face stiff opposition.
The folks agitating for “social revolt” are not people at risk of losing their jobs, rather it’s the same people who’ve been agitating for social revolt for decades - people wealthy enough to spend years in university reading critical theory whose financial security was never at risk, whether from wheelbarrows or robots.
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.
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 and worse for more and more people; GDP could go down a lot and things could still get better for many people. Without some kind of (in)equality adjustment, GDP is meaningless at best and misleading at worst.
> Why not just tax wealth at steeply progressive rates? If the robots result in increased wealth inequality, a wealth tax will counteract that.
It has been tried. Wealth tax means rich people (who already pay most of the taxes) are leaving the country, then the state gets fewer taxes, not more.
I support the concept of taxing wealth, but I've yet to find a good way to implement it. The two biggest issues are that wealth is easily moved to places where it can't be taxed, and those making the tax decisions are easily influenced by those with wealth.
Wealth moves in lots of ways. Yes, as has been pointed out, we over value stock assets. When you own a significant percentage of a company, you can't just sell that ownership at the last trading price (the stock price would quickly crash). Wealth is also moved between national borders, allowing the wealthy to shop for the lowest tax location to stash their funds. Property can't be moved, but it can be financed with debt, making it taxed at effectively 0%. And the other side of that debt may just be an overseas shell company. There will be entire industries formed around avoiding a wealth tax, funded by the wealthy.
But probably the most capital efficient way to avoid the wealth tax is to buy politicians, influence the elections, and invest in lobbyist, which the wealthy do in the US to avoid taxes. Until money is removed from politics, I'm not holding out any hope that we'll find a way to tax the wealthy.
There are already tax schemes for productive enterprise, and this is not the first time people have been displaced by technology. It happens all the time. Also, does it matter if it's AI doing the production vs overseas labor? If you're worried that people won't be able to afford to buy the output of the AI, that kind of implies that they can work for cheaper than the AI (and can thus outcompete it, at least on average). In the long run, things will reach a new and probably more abundant state. In the short or medium term, we may have some pain and need to strategize how to help people adapt.
In a world where many western states extort their subjects for almost half the wealth they produce (OECD average is 34% and in countries like France the state extorts 46% of all GDP in taxes and other mandatory contributions and an insane 82% of all gross salary), some people first thought when they think of AI, is: “but how are we going to tax it?”.
People on the left love to say “true communism has never been tried”.
Well, when you live in a world where supposed capitalist countries forcibly take 46% of the GDP to be controlled by the government, it’s more accurate to state that “true capitalism has never been tried”.
What the f does "AI should pay taxes" even mean? These people drank their own cerebral fluid. Any company using AI is already paying taxes through their earnings.
On the plus pole of the circuit the government prints the tokens and spends it on the things it wants done.
On the minus pole it pulls the tokens via taxes.
This is a means to compel the population to do work (pay taxes with tokens else jail, only way to get tokens is to do work).
The idea to tax work is an economical oxymoron.
Looking at the actual article, the people suggesting taxes on AI are American Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps, and Bill Gates, founder of MSFT. The Europeans suggest more general taxes on capital instead.
Simple well known and preventable accounting tricks make the rich never need to pay a fair share. Yet regular people are now even seeing their electricity bills go up because they're using the infrastructure to such an extent.
Yet the sentiment here is : Well don't be silly, they're making profits so they're paying taxes.
They're not making a profit, yet they're reducing employment, increasing services bills for everyone else.
I think this is very silly. I dislike the whole AI hype as much as any other. But by that standard you could also ask "Should Photoshop also pay taxes?" or "Should printers also pay taxes?"
If we are oh so productive that people can make oh so much money then A) finally do collect taxes from wealthy people/companies/families and B) use those taxes to do obvious things that benefit everyone including the wealthy, like good infrastructure, healthcare, stuff that creates a stable society and seduction to face all the big problems that exist.
There are huge problems in every country and since the claim of AI is gonna create so much more productivity and wealth we should make use of the freed resources to finally tackle them instead of pushing everyone into dumb bullshit jobs.
We live in a world where rich people (and it doesn't really matter which country) use their companies to essentially live off taxes. "Oh that computer/car/jet/travel/video game/TV/house/...? I need for work. Look I have to fly to customers and oh I also have that social media thing for advertisement". Oh and then they claim they'll just leave the country if they have to pay taxes which would be oh so bad for the country they don't contribute much to.
And then the employees are essentially asked to pay the taxes to compensate. For them tax reduction means that they have to pay for things like infrastructure that largely benefits corporations themselves. But hey it looks great on the paycheck when the money you have to pay anyways isn't subtracted.
158 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 92.7 ms ] threadWhy would taking scarce resources away from productive businesses and allocating to unproductive things be good for anyone other than government bureaucrats?
AI is on track to being able to remove a society-changing amount of jobs, wheel barrows improved worker's efficiency.
social unrest must be priced in at this point somewhere
That's unique in human history
Just saying ....
That's the problem. AI has the same tax problems as corporations. But US corporate taxes are historically very low and easy to evade.
Worrying about a hypothetical T-1000 future seems less urgent than reducing the homelessness that exists right in front of us.
Otherwise you're ceding control of the Overton window to the folks aiming for techno-serfdom.
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 and worse for more and more people; GDP could go down a lot and things could still get better for many people. Without some kind of (in)equality adjustment, GDP is meaningless at best and misleading at worst.
It has been tried. Wealth tax means rich people (who already pay most of the taxes) are leaving the country, then the state gets fewer taxes, not more.
Wealth moves in lots of ways. Yes, as has been pointed out, we over value stock assets. When you own a significant percentage of a company, you can't just sell that ownership at the last trading price (the stock price would quickly crash). Wealth is also moved between national borders, allowing the wealthy to shop for the lowest tax location to stash their funds. Property can't be moved, but it can be financed with debt, making it taxed at effectively 0%. And the other side of that debt may just be an overseas shell company. There will be entire industries formed around avoiding a wealth tax, funded by the wealthy.
But probably the most capital efficient way to avoid the wealth tax is to buy politicians, influence the elections, and invest in lobbyist, which the wealthy do in the US to avoid taxes. Until money is removed from politics, I'm not holding out any hope that we'll find a way to tax the wealthy.
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.
People on the left love to say “true communism has never been tried”.
Well, when you live in a world where supposed capitalist countries forcibly take 46% of the GDP to be controlled by the government, it’s more accurate to state that “true capitalism has never been tried”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_France
It's disingenuous to claim that companies are paying the fair amount of taxes on their earnings.
Plainly speaking, the human labor who will be replaced pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes that corporations.
https://observer.com/2024/11/sam-altman-openai-salary/
Simple well known and preventable accounting tricks make the rich never need to pay a fair share. Yet regular people are now even seeing their electricity bills go up because they're using the infrastructure to such an extent.
Yet the sentiment here is : Well don't be silly, they're making profits so they're paying taxes.
They're not making a profit, yet they're reducing employment, increasing services bills for everyone else.
https://www.iea.org/news/ai-is-set-to-drive-surging-electric...
EU in a nutshell.
If we are oh so productive that people can make oh so much money then A) finally do collect taxes from wealthy people/companies/families and B) use those taxes to do obvious things that benefit everyone including the wealthy, like good infrastructure, healthcare, stuff that creates a stable society and seduction to face all the big problems that exist.
There are huge problems in every country and since the claim of AI is gonna create so much more productivity and wealth we should make use of the freed resources to finally tackle them instead of pushing everyone into dumb bullshit jobs.
We live in a world where rich people (and it doesn't really matter which country) use their companies to essentially live off taxes. "Oh that computer/car/jet/travel/video game/TV/house/...? I need for work. Look I have to fly to customers and oh I also have that social media thing for advertisement". Oh and then they claim they'll just leave the country if they have to pay taxes which would be oh so bad for the country they don't contribute much to.
And then the employees are essentially asked to pay the taxes to compensate. For them tax reduction means that they have to pay for things like infrastructure that largely benefits corporations themselves. But hey it looks great on the paycheck when the money you have to pay anyways isn't subtracted.