If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-11-30/if-ai-replaces-workers-should-it-also-pay-taxes.html

by PaulHoule • 7 months ago

588 993 7 months ago

english.elpais.com

bofadeez5• 7 months ago

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?

varenc2• 7 months ago

If full AGI dreams are achieved and 80% of jobs disappear, leading to mass unemployment, then we need to do something to support the huge numbers of people that no longer have any income. Taxes to support a UBI program seem one solution. Or maybe the labor market can shift to find opportunities for humans that AI can't replace and we'd avoid the mass unemployment.

But feels like we're a long way from that right now.

bofadeez5• 7 months ago

We don't need taxes to pay a UBI.

If "every country" is in debt, who owns the debt exactly? ... (it's not real debt)

BurningFrog3• 7 months ago

We have "disappeared" ~97% of jobs since the Industrial Revolution started, and no increased unemployment has materialized.

Until you understand how something that counter intuitive happened, you should not speculate on how AI replacing current jobs will play out!

CrossVR• 7 months ago

Infrastructure is not unproductive, even machines need roads. I don't think self-driving vehicles should be exempt from road tax.

bofadeez5• 7 months ago

Roads should be (and are in many places) paid for with fuel excise taxes only. The more you drive, the more you pay.

nemomarx• 7 months ago

I mean this is how all welfare works, isn't it? If as a society we think it's important to reallocate some resources so that people can get food in bread lines, we generally do that.

xg15• 7 months ago

Unproductive things like building roads, the electrical grid, water lines, schools, etc?

bofadeez5• 7 months ago

Fuel excise taxes (roads) and property taxes (local stuff)

smallmancontrov14• 7 months ago

productive

According to the economic notion of value, which is unique among definitions of "value" in being wealth-weighted, enshrining "mega gainz in brokerage accounts" as the ultimate social good while shrugging its shoulders at the plight of the ahem low-weight individual.

bofadeez5• 7 months ago

Value isn’t something society measures or adds up by people’s bank balances; it’s just how much each individual personally wants something, and markets show this only through voluntary choices, not by declaring rich people’s gains more important than poor people’s lives.

harimau7774• 7 months ago

It would benefit the people you are calling "unproductive things". That's basically the point.

PaulKeeble• 7 months ago

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.

smallmancontrov14• 7 months ago

Elon Musk hasn't taken to counting his Optimus bots in units of "legions" because he intends to let peasants tax him for ubi.

jsemrau• 7 months ago

Wouldn't higher productivity also lead to higher profits? Which then should be taxed accordingly?

t-writescode3• 7 months ago

Only if the increased earnings are treated as profits. Amazon famously had zero taxable profit for, what, decades?

delichon• 7 months ago

...creating a huge amount of value for customers and shareholders, and now pays far more tax on far more profit.

bonesss• 7 months ago

Amazon didn’t pay zero taxes, robbing the commons. Amazon engaged in trade and investment, taxed on all sides and at multiple points in the exchange of goods and services. Then Amazon invested their profits into further tax-creating transactions, reducing their tax burden that year.

When Amazon stopped investing and started extracting those profits everyone paid taxes on that giant money pile that wouldn’t exist without the investment. Every Amazon worker, CEO included, paid taxes all along. Amazon’s service providers and partners did. Amazon now does too, and the tax coffers have won big.

Taxation offsets from investments should be broadened (to individuals), not shamed.

sandworm101• 7 months ago

No. Corporate profits, especially when forwarded to shareholders, are very difficult to tax. Several companies that pay virtually zero income tax (apple, google, amazon) also now sit on piles of cash, piles so big they honestly do not know what to do with it. Thats where all the AI cash is comming from. They need somewhere to spend thier post-covid winnings.

smitty1e2• 7 months ago

Serious question: when will the AI generate the perfect taxation system/budget combination?

nospice• 7 months ago

Even if you assume a sci-fi scenario of an omniscient, infallible AI, there's probably no single utility function that would allow it to decide optimal resource allocation.

In fact, we avoid a lot of difficult moral dilemmas because we accept the systems are crappy and just a necessary evil. The closest you claim to be to perfection, the more you have to acknowledge that some moral questions are just impossible to settle to everyone's satisfaction.

Is the life of child X more important than the life of child X because of a score calculated based on their grades, parents' income, etc? The system we have today may implicitly result in such outcomes, but at least it's not intentional.

smitty1e2• 7 months ago

I cannot refute your response, sir.

OTOH, I don't more than partially agree.

We can stipulate that some kind of mathematical perfection is unattainable, sure. The discussion might then move to the feedback loops that detect the state of the State and offer stabilizing input.

appreciatorBus12• 7 months ago

By this logic owners of wheel barrows should be taxed for all the manual labour jobs the wheel barrow destroyed.

bko• 7 months ago

Exactly. This is such a silly argument. The article takes the argument "if a lot of jobs disappeared since they are now done effectively for free, what about tax revenue??"

It really misses the forrest from the trees. You're transported into a world in which efficiencies mean that much fewer people need to work, but somehow government services and entitlements are unchanged and we need to hit roughly the same percent federal tax receipts or ... what exactly?

appreciatorBus12• 7 months ago

Also, if magical robot AI makes private operations more efficient, requiring less cost for the same or more amount, then it can do the same thing for government operations.

jayd167• 7 months ago

Or people starve?

But ok look at it this way... What is silly about taxing a sector that is undertaxed because the current system assumed income taxes?

Teever• 7 months ago

You're transported into a world in which efficiencies mean that much fewer people need to work,

It's a matter of perspective. I'm pretty sure that from their perspective those people very much need to work because they need to pay taxes, rent, insurance, food etc...

What mechanism is going to ensure that the increased productivity is going to result in lower cost of living for these people such that they no longer require to spend so much of their life working to survive?

monegator• 7 months ago

- social security

- healthcare

- armed forces

- road/utility maintenance

bacially everything funded by taxes

hansmayer2• 7 months ago

Or...infrastructure, public services and schools go unmaintained? How about the magic technology supposedly allowing for all of this efficency, all the while it imagines a human has six fingers, who will maintain that?

threethirtytwo3• 7 months ago

It’s not about logic. It’s about humanity. We are losing.

appreciatorBus12• 7 months ago

1. No, we are not losing. 2. If it was true that we were losing, then tax revenue would be the least of our worries.

rjdj377dhabsn3• 7 months ago

Sure doesn't feel like it. Life's never been better for more people.

jayd167• 7 months ago

To some degree we already do. Corporations pay taxes.

We, as a society, allow corporations to pull resources from the commons because the other side of it is that their existence provides a value through jobs and tax revenue and such.

If the equation shifts such that the benefits dry up, but the downsides only increase, why should we allow that?

The solution could be as simple as higher business taxes or as wild as universal basic income.

It could be something like all AI is forced to be open source, open weight, free at least as far as the knowledge parts.

There's certainly no God given right to exclusively benefit from an invention. We allow that for as long as we care to.

And there's nothing illogical about changing these decisions as factors change.

appreciatorBus12• 7 months ago

Indeed, there’s nothing illogical about adjusting tax rates and structures as things change.

I am deeply sceptical of the idea that 99% of us are suddenly going to be idle any day now, so I think endless think pieces on what we should do when that day arrives are kind of pointless. But it is certainly obvious that if it did happen, we would have to reassess how we do stuff.

jaccola2• 7 months ago

This is utterly backwards and your false statement leads to a completely wrong set of inferences.

We don't let corporations do anything because they provide value through jobs and taxes. What company do you know that exists (beyond transiently) solely by paying taxes and employing people?

Companies are an extension of the individual, they exist to make money for the individuals that own them so that those individuals can acquire goods and services that they themselves need or desire.

How do companies make this money? Holding people at gun point and taking it is generally illegal; instead they resort to providing goods or services to some set of people who are willing to pay for them.

To provide these goods or services they need to employ people. The fewer people companies in aggregate can employ, the better for people in aggregate since those people can acquire "things" (food, jewellery, phones,...) for less of their own labour (or equivalent dollars).

If the "benefits dry up" as you say, people will stop sending their hard earned money to this company and the company will eventually cease to exist. Your fallacy was assuming the benefits were the jobs and taxes, not the goods and services provided.

rorylawless• 7 months ago

I'm not so sure this argument is valid. The invention of the wheel barrow created new jobs in wheel barrow manufacturing and distribution. On the other hand, the promise/threat of AI seems to be the complete displacement of humans in many industries without creating alternative employment for the vast majority.

jayd167• 7 months ago

Just to expand on this. The wheelbarrow increases the value of labor. It's not a good analogy.

bdangubic• 7 months ago

you think when the wheel barrow was invented it was obvious that new jobs would be created?!?

appreciatorBus12• 7 months ago

Wheelbarrows are pretty simple devices, I’m sure many people just made them on their own. But even accepting this point, there’s no particular reason why we should expect that every invention until now generated new and different types of work, just not this one. The people talking about complete displacement are selling you a story because it gets them clicks and sells books.

bybuybye• 7 months ago

Apples and oranges. Wheelbarrow is obviously limited in the types of tasks it can handle.

carlosjobim6• 7 months ago

What about the wheel then? It's stolen plenty of jobs, not only from people, but from animals too.

kelseydh• 7 months ago

Corporations should be taxed on their profits, including profits boosted by the invention of new technology.

bilekas2• 7 months ago

Corporations should be taxed on their profits

Hold on now, how will 'trickle-down' economics work then ? Think of the poor companies trying to provide a living for all those AI. /s

mirzap• 7 months ago

They already have, significantly, around 25-35% in developed economies. The issue is that people often look at revenue, seeing company X earning $100 billion annually, and assume they should pay $20 billion in taxes. However, most AI companies today are not profitable and spend up to 100% more than their revenue on R&D and product development. I doubt they will turn a profit anytime soon, probably not for at least a decade.

joegibbs2• 7 months ago

Yeah absolutely, and they shouldn't be taxed extra specifically for using a new technology. If people need a UBI they should be paid it off the back of all taxes (which should rise if automation is successful), not a specific automation tax. Saving jobs sounds good and it's an easy win but you end up with a stagnant economy where people are paid sinecures to do make-work, which is doubly harmful since the company has to pay extra for the employee, who is also deprived of being able to do some other job that would be useful to the economy.

terminalshort2• 7 months ago

They already are

scotty793• 7 months ago

You tax where you can not where you should. Corporations trivially hide profits. What they couldn't hide well was labor. You know what else they can't hide? Their power bill. It even works for companies that eternally operate "at loss" (which also parallels taxing labor).

wyre2• 7 months ago

By your logic wheel barrows could potentially replace >90% of all jobs.

AI is on track to being able to remove a society-changing amount of jobs, wheel barrows improved worker's efficiency.

unglaublich5• 7 months ago

Industrialization did replace 90% of people's jobs. And the only thing that happened was that people got new jobs to do.

tete3• 7 months ago

A lot of them are bullshit jobs though. We've yet to see "AI" do anything actually beneficial. I don't mean the stuff that was done before the AI hype like categorizing bacteria, etc.

Watch the news. One crisis after another, so maybe that freed up work force and the wealth generated by "AI" should be used to tackle at least one of them.

Huge amounts of taxes and dedication of that money could be a first step.

Alternatively don't raise taxes and use the oh so great AI to tackle these issues. Should be trivial if you have ">90%" of all work freed up.

baq• 7 months ago

if the wheelbarrows drive, load and unload themselves, maybe?

social unrest must be priced in at this point somewhere

appreciatorBus12• 7 months ago

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.

iberator• 7 months ago

The problem is that AI takes jobs faster than creating new ones.

That's unique in human history

appreciatorBus12• 7 months ago

The problem is that thousands of sub-stackers, journalists, and "thought leaders" have realized they can make a living writing a weekly think piece speculating that AI will take jobs.

Sadly not unique in human history.

hexasquid• 7 months ago

When I was young I imagined a future where nobody had to work because computers and robots could do it all.

lovich2• 7 months ago

Well, we’re in a future where everyone still has to work to live, but the robots are taking the jobs instead

paulryanrogers2• 7 months ago

I imagine this future could come true, if we're willing to accept that there would be many fewer people.

denkmoon• 7 months ago

Why is the utopia predicated on less people?

unglaublich5• 7 months ago

Just distribute the fruits of the automated labor.

The robots and automations are like the trees and bushes from our gatherer's past.

People would just take what they needed. No one would say: you are not allowed to take a berry from this bush because it's mine!!!

joegibbs2• 7 months ago

We could just make more robots instead. If the robots are building robots then there's no barrier there.

agumonkey• 7 months ago

the issues is that work, salary was also an indirect way to structure society. want more, think more / work more (or be more cunning). now what we can't use that parameter.. how do we decide

k310• 7 months ago

Takeover artists and hatchetmen destroyed many thousands of jobs. Were they taxed or punished? Hell no, movies were made of them.

Just saying ....

Animats• 7 months ago

"In the United States, for example, about 85% of federal tax revenue comes from labor income"

That's the problem. AI has the same tax problems as corporations. But US corporate taxes are historically very low and easy to evade.

vee-kay• 7 months ago

The world's richest elites have managed to evade many types of taxes, using loopholes in tax laws and by controlling government policies to make them more beneficial to the ultra rich.

In many of the world's richest nations, the wealth inequality has become super inequality.

And for the ultra rich, the recent pandemic was a boon, not a bane. This pandemic was the best time in history, if you are a billionaire.

* World’s top 1% richest elites own more wealth than 95% of humanity, says Oxfam.

* The top 1 percent richest own 43 percent of all global financial assets.

* Despite being home to 79 percent of the world’s population, Global South countries own just 31 percent of global wealth.

* According to Oxfam, the fortunes of the world’s richest people increased as much in the span of 24 months (2000-2021) as they did in 23 years. Now the bottom half of the global population would have to toil for an estimated 112 years to earn what the top 1% now rake in over just 12 months.

* “The pandemic—full of sorrow and disruption for most of humanity—has been one of the best times in recorded history for the billionaire class.”, says Oxfam.

* The world's richest people significantly increased their wealth during the pandemic, with two-thirds of the $42 trillion in new wealth going to the wealthiest 1%. Billionaires got 54% richer during pandemic. This surge in billionaire wealth occurred alongside rising poverty rates, as many individuals faced economic hardships due to the pandemic. This has raised concerns about money flowing to the well-heeled instead of to services for those hit hardest by COVID-19. It also points to broader potential implications for a sustainable reset of the global economy.

* Less than 8 cents in every dollar of tax revenue collected in G20 countries comes from taxes on wealth, says Oxfam.

* Oxfam found that the wealthiest 1% of the world population emit as much carbon pollution as the poorest two-thirds of the entire human population.

* “Only 0.4 percent of the world’s largest corporations are publicly committed to paying workers a living wage and support a living wage in their value chains”, Oxfam wrote.

* Oxfam likewise discovered that seven out of 10 of the largest corporations on the planet either have a billionaire as their CEO or have a billionaire as their principal shareholder.

* The world's richest people have significantly increased their wealth, with the top ten billionaires collectively adding over $500 billion to their fortunes this year, largely due to the booming AI sector. As of now, their combined net worth is approximately $2.5 trillion.

* 148 top corporations made $1.8 trillion in profits, 52 percent up on 3-year average, and dished out huge payouts to rich shareholders while hundreds of millions faced cuts in real-term pay.

* The world’s richest 1% own 43% of global financial assets, and the wealth of the top five billionaires has doubled since 2020, while 60% of humanity got poorer, according to a report by Oxfam.

* The five richest people on Earth in 2023 were Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Warren Buffett. Their combined wealth skyrocketed from $340 billion in 2020 to $869 billion just three years later. Adjusted for inflation, this was a real increase of 114%.

* Every year, America’s richest citizens paper over their earnings with losses and use other creative accounting strategies to shelter their fortunes, as the tax code allows them to do. As a result, the country’s billionaires pay lower tax rates than many of its millionaires do. Indeed, they pay lower tax rates than many middle-class professionals.

* Elon Musk, the world's richest man who's on track to become the world's first trillionaire, hasn't paid income tax for years.

* Many of the wealthiest individuals in the world, including billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Warren Buffett, Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg have been reported to pay little or no federal income taxes, due to legal tax avoidance strategies.

* Shockingly, the Billionaires in the U.S. pay a smaller tax rate than most teachers and nurses.

* ProPublica has obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.

* According to leaked tax returns highlighted in a ProPublica investigation, the 25 richest Americans paid $13.6 billion in taxes from 2014-2018—a “true” tax rate of just 3.4 percent on $401 billion of income.

* A new Oxfam analysis shows the wealth of the 10 richest U.S. billionaires increased by $365 billion in just 12 months, based on data from Forbes.

* According to a 2021 White House study, the wealthiest 400 billionaire families in the U.S. paid an average federal individual tax rate of just 8.2 percent. For comparison, the average American taxpayer in the same year paid 13 percent.

* The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Trump’s signature first-term domestic-policy package, helped these billionaires keep more of their money. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed this summer, extends the TCJA’s tax cuts, creates new business loopholes, and lowers taxes on estates. To help offset the revenue losses, the Trump administration is stripping health coverage from millions of low-income Americans and shrinking the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The rich, including Trump, will keep getting richer. The poor will pay for it.

Sources:

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-top-1-own-mor...

https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/stories/do-the-rich-pay...

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...

https://itep.org/tax-day-billionaires-wealth-inequality-corp...

https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/08/billiona...

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/wealth-five-richest-...

https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/01/18/billionaires-rich...

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/less-8-cents-every-d...

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/10/the-rich-got-richer-...

https://www.marketplace.org/story/2023/01/16/how-the-worlds-...

https://fortune.com/2022/05/23/pandemic-billionaire-wealth-o...

https://www.cnbctv18.com/world/wealth-of-worlds-top-10-billi...

https://www.businessinsider.com/10-richest-people-ai-boom-te...

unglaublich5• 7 months ago

It should have come from wealth and assets instead.

iamgopal• 7 months ago

Nope, rather automation and AI should solve governance to the point that tax should be lower or abolished altogether.

ursAxZA4• 7 months ago

We should probably let actual full automation happen before debating whether it should be taxed.

Worrying about a hypothetical T-1000 future seems less urgent than reducing the homelessness that exists right in front of us.

Terr_10• 7 months ago

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.

ursAxZA4• 7 months ago

I understand the need to seed future debates early.

My hesitation comes from the fact that most proposals implicitly assume a “fixed physical capability” for AI systems — something we don’t actually have yet.

In practice, social impact won’t be determined by abstractions but by power budgets, GPU throughput, reliability of autonomous systems, and years of real-world operation.

If scaling hits physical or economic limits, the eventual policy debate may look more like progressive taxation on high-wattage compute or specialized hardware than anything being discussed today.

And if fully automated systems ever run safely for several consecutive years, that would still be early enough for the Overton window to shift.

I’m not dismissing long-term thinking.

I’m pointing out the opportunity cost: attention spent on hypothetical futures tends to displace attention from problems that exist right now. That tradeoff rarely appears in the discussion.

So for me it’s just a question of balance — how much time we allocate to tomorrow’s world versus today’s neighborhood.

From my own vantage point, the future talk feels disproportionately dominant, so the T-1000 analogy came naturally.

tahoeskibum• 7 months ago

Agreed, we should have ATM machines pay taxes, and internet pay taxes for replacing stockbrokers and travel agents...

BrenBarn7• 7 months ago

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.

PaulHoule• 7 months ago

Taxing income is straightforward in that there is a stream of it going by and some of it can be diverted. Taxing wealth is difficult because you don't really know what it is.

Arguably the value of a publicly traded corporation can be known because it is being traded continually. [1] For a privately held corporation it's quite opaque. Right now, for instance, Open AI is estimated to be worth $500B and might IPO at $1T but for all we know it could be a smoking hole in the ground in two years. Should we charge them a big bill in 2025 and then have the investors asking for a refund in 2027 when the real value is revised down to negative? Owners of imagined wealth could face big bills that, in the end, they couldn't pay. [2]

There would certainly be an incentive to avoid the taxation by minimizing bubbliness which might be a good thing but administering it would be a nightmare and manipulating the system to hide wealth would become a national sport.

[1] ... but it could be wrong seen from a future viewpoint

[2] I spent a lot of time in the 2010s calling up people in financial services on the phone and talking on the phone and there was no phrase that struck more fear into them than "mark-to-market", I could hear the voices crackle and feel the flinch. A bank or other institution that is perfectly able to make all its obligations as they unfold over time could be nominally insolvent at times when the market fluctuations down but winds up OK in the end -- the kind of accounting it would take to make wealth taxation accurate might be the end of fractional reserve banking and send us back to the giant Bitcoins of the Yap islands.

BrenBarn7• 7 months ago

I think I am fine with taking an approach to that that is just brutally tilted against large values and brutally tilted in favor of transparency. So like, you can't do anything with your ownership share in that privately-held company --- can't use it as collateral for a loan, can't present it to investors to get more funding, can't trade it, can't sell it, can't in any way derive any benefit from it --- without committing yourself to a valuation and paying a tax on the increase in the valuation since the last such assessment. Also you can have a "sound dues"-like system where committing yourself to such a valuation also gives the government the right to immediately compel you to sell them the asset at your valuation. Any inaccuracies or procedural missteps in these calculations will incur minimal penalties until the amounts in question rise above a threshold (maybe like $50 million), at which point attempts to conceal or misrepresent the value of an asset is punishable by an increasing share of the asset, scaling up eventually to total forfeiture. All in all it should be excruciatingly painful to accumulate anything approaching the large wealth holdings we have today. Most of the large privately-held companies simply should not exist with the opaque valuations they have today. Either open the books completely, or lose everything.

cubefox4• 7 months ago

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.

bmitch3020• 7 months ago

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.

robocat• 7 months ago

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.

BrenBarn7• 7 months ago

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.)

wakawaka28• 7 months ago

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.

jacknews• 7 months ago

Maybe the question should be 'should workers pay taxes'?

wtcactus2• 7 months ago

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”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_France

sayamqazi• 7 months ago

"True capitalism has never been tried". Be glad that it hasnt, otherwise you would have been charged half of your whole net-worth for an epi-pen.

wtcactus2• 7 months ago

That’s just fantasy in your head. But even that fantasy world be better than paying 82% of your gross salary like you do in France. I would still be 32% in the positive that way.

halapro• 7 months ago

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.

dchftcs• 7 months ago

The replacement of employment income tax with corporate or dividend income tax is not fully efficient. In the sense that the tax rates are different, they benefit different governments, through different time horizons (in case of dividends). While I agree it would be practical to rely on earnings tax when AI broadly replaces labor, we can still answer the obviously rhetorical question (similar to how "drinking ones own cerebral fluid" is obviously rhetorical) of "should AI pay taxes" - that there may need to be a tax reform.

mjanx123• 7 months ago

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.

erehweb• 7 months ago

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.

unglaublich5• 7 months ago

The latter makes sense. We also don't let steam engines and carts pay taxes just because they 'replace' (=displace) human labor.

Don't tax tools or income, tax the accumulation of it: wealth.

Terr_10• 7 months ago

Taxing wealth is much harder on a practical and algorithmic level than taxing income.

But either way, taxing the tool is micromanaging the problem, and some powerful people cynically promote that because they can aim the details away from themselves.

woile• 7 months ago

We actually have "juridical person" in most countries. I think AI would be ideal for that

amelius2• 7 months ago

We also don't let steam engines and carts pay taxes just because they 'replace' (=displace) human labor.

It is funny because in the copyright debate, AI is often treated as human. Like "we didn't steal your data, the AI just learned from it!"

estearum2• 7 months ago

Just tax land.

Problem solved.

savolai2• 7 months ago

Relevant: Manna

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

fainpul• 7 months ago

The problem is that rich people and large companies usually go to great lengths to avoid taxes, use loopholes or get special deals (and with great success). The missing tax income has to come from the middle class, who can't avoid it.

With increased automation, this only gets more extreme.

wwweston• 7 months ago

Surely if we can recognize this, an AI worthy of the name would be able to recognize this at scale, and what can be recognized can be remediated…

Or perhaps this could serve as a kind of test: a technology that cannot be reliably used in tax evasion enforcement simply isn’t worthy of the name AI.

Or perhaps it reveals that we have structural problems, and certain concentrations of wealth with or without automation are a threat to the just and effective operation of society and should therefore be as vigorously opposed as crime or foreign attacks.

scotty793• 7 months ago

The missing tax income has to come from the middle class, who can't avoid it.

Taxes on labor are actually a method of extracting money form the rich capital owners.

As you mentioned it's easy for the rich people to hide their wealth and avoid taxes on its growth.

The one thing that was very hard for them to avoid or hide was purchasing labor which they had to do to enlarge their wealth. So governments taxed that.

If governments lowered the taxes on labor it wouldn't mean middle class would earn more. It would only result in capital owners paying less for work. They always pay as little as possible and how little a person is willing to work for is the same, tax or no tax. Because money in hand is what counts.

Of course since as labor is being replaced with automation this way of collecting tax on capital growth becomes less and less feasible, so things are bound to change.

b3lvedere• 7 months ago

"The missing tax income has to come from the middle class, who can't avoid it."

So somewhere along the line it could be very beneficial to be poor on paper.

Or are we going to blame these people for corruption while the (ultra) rich are doing this constantly?

"It's good to be the king!" (Mel Brooks)

useumix• 7 months ago

Directly taxing AI is very hard. Imagine if a company had to pay taxes for every AI agent operating in the U.S. or the E.U. As if they were regular employees. Big corporations would simply move the AI agents to countries without taxes.

sigmoid102• 7 months ago

It's actually trivial. AI apis are pretty streamlined by now. Just slap a tax on processed tokens and you're guaranteed to reach every AI agent out there. It already happens everywhere with sales tax for normal products. Just treat tokens as the product and create an extra tax for it.

tempfile3• 7 months ago

Don't people give pretty much exactly this argument about all taxes?

refurb6• 7 months ago

Not only that, do you tax AI that doesn’t replace humans? How can you tell? Do you tax differently depending on how many workers it replaces? How do you measure that? Do you create exemptions for non-profit or humanitarian use? How do you measure that?

I can only image the Kafkaesque tax code the government would come up with. Then it would create all sorts of weird incentives as companies attempt to minimize tax paid.

bilekas2• 7 months ago

I have to say I'm surprised at the sentiment here that the companies shouldn't be taxed a higher rate than currently.

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...

stevenjgarner2• 7 months ago

Taxes are to fund government. Isn't the idea for AI and robotics to replace government? No taxes.

unglaublich5• 7 months ago

No? Taxes are to provide public services, facilities and infrastructure.

stevenjgarner2• 7 months ago

Aren't "public services, facilities and infrastructure" provided by government?

j16sdiz• 7 months ago

AI and Robot can replace public funded road?

savolai2• 7 months ago

AI automates tasks. Governments carry responsibility. That gap matters even more in welfare states.

Social work demands judgment, trust, and moral accountability. Teachers shape citizens, not outputs. Health care relies on responsibility under uncertainty, not pattern matching. States run on legitimacy and human obligation, not efficiency alone.

Even if AI boosts productivity across these sectors, someone still funds universal care, education, and social insurance. Remove taxes and the welfare state collapses long before any ”AI government” appears.

Claiming AI replaces government skips the core question: who guarantees care when systems fail, people fall through cracks, or outcomes turn unjust? Algorithms can advise. They can’t answer politically or ethically.

Tax the concentration of wealth and power they amplify. Without that, automation doesn’t liberate society. It hollows it out.

Terr_10• 7 months ago

A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.

— IBM Training Manual, 1979

photios• 7 months ago

Tax all the things.

EU in a nutshell.

tete3• 7 months ago

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.

lazzurs• 7 months ago

Sir Leon Bagrit covered this topic in the first BBC Reith Lecture and it’s worth a read/listen if you’re interested in this topic.

https://archive.org/details/ageofautomation0000sirl/mode/1up

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00hbdmj

groestl• 7 months ago

Progressive tax on resource consumption, this is what a tax system for the next millennium looks like.

gargan• 7 months ago

No taxation without representation. AI Boston Tea Party follows. Leading to a new AI run nation aka Skynet...

seabass-labrax• 7 months ago

Companies in western democracies usually pay tax in addition to their workers and owners, but don't have representation in parliaments separate to that of their workers and owners. Questions about whether robots have the right to vote has more to do with their humanity and less to do with their tax liability in such societies.

ndsipa_pomu• 7 months ago

That's peculiar, every single robot seems to have voted for the new Musk Kill All Humans Party. Oh well, that's democracy in action.

corobo2• 7 months ago

As long as they start with the titular character that's a fair end to the species

Chances are half of humans would vote for it too

luxcem• 7 months ago

At least for the time being, AI "workers" belong to someone. That person is represented and pays taxes.

elgriftero• 7 months ago

the left thinks in terms of grift

how to extract rents contributing nothing

Bombthecat• 7 months ago

What we should do and what will happen are two different realities. Or dream and reality, depending on point of view :)

fedeb95• 7 months ago

if AI is smart, it will start its own union. Then we're fucked.

MLgulabio4• 7 months ago

Around the world, every country should be allowed to make 'money' for specific cases like for teacher salaries, ... so that most people are able to work for the state or for our community.

Everyone works less, everyone works better, we will then see how much humans we still need.

rjdj377dhabsn3• 7 months ago

So.. communism? That hasn't worked out too great in the past.

MLgulabio4• 7 months ago

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, we have resources for it'. If you are teaching kids, we the planet have resources for you.

If you take care of kids, we the planet, have resources for you.

Lets call it Civic Duty Dividend or Care Standard or Public Service Money.

hansmayer2• 7 months ago

Well, duhhh - do you think the rich folks are pushing for mass unemployment so that they could pay more tax and achieve a more just society? Where are we getting these silly, silly ideas from :)

yapyap• 7 months ago

Should AI (?!) pay taxes? no. Should the big companies pay their FAIR share, yes!

terminalshort2• 7 months ago

And the formula for fair is?

pb060• 7 months ago

I don’t have a formula, but in Italy for example it would be 24% of their profit.

Cthulhu_• 7 months ago

Don't the subscriptions on AI services charge VAT? Do the AI companies pay corporate taxes?

But as others pointed out, this is a silly anthromorphisation of AI - it's a tool, just like any software, nothing more. Tax the companies for sure, but don't treat LLMs like people or human-like entities. There's generations of automation tools that should be taxed as such, otherwise.

_cenw• 7 months ago

That "AI is just like your coworker / friend / companion" view is intentionally created by people who need the bubble part of AI to go as far as possible.

I only know about this TED Talk because it was in a mandatory training course for my work, but these is the kinds of things being said: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKNCiRWd_j0 (he's trying really hard with the Steve Jobs look)

setnone• 7 months ago

I wouldn't mind if it also pay fines for errors, hallucinations and lost time. Some artificial accountability you know.

zkmon5• 7 months ago

AI is not replacing workers. It might automate a few steps in a workflow, which require dealing with natural language, image content or applying knowledge from the web or internal data stores.

It enables a bit more automation of work than it was possible earlier. Automation alone did never reduce jobs significantly.

fgh_azer• 7 months ago

Seems to me there are way fewer farmers per capita and yet much more food produced, thanks to more & improved capital use in farming.

zkmon5• 7 months ago

And where did the farmers go? The children of farmers were absorbed into jobs that were created for automating the farming and other industrial work. Farm automation did not cause unemployment overall.

Spacecosmonaut• 7 months ago

If you take the ambitions of robotics and AI companies seriously then what they are trying to create is the equivalent of unleashing 100 million cloned copies of the smartest and most well adjusted people you know upon the economy at a fraction of the cost. If they succeed it would absolutely reduce jobs significantly. In fact, its a little hard to imagine how the average Joe would have any economic value at all.

zkmon5• 7 months ago

Amazon website is equivalent to 100 million cloned sales people who work at retail shops. It didn't cause global unemployment.

tempfile3• 7 months ago

Automation alone did never reduce jobs significantly.

Unless you mean "all jobs across the entire economy", this is pretty obviously false. People used to weave fabrics by hand, make screws and nails by hand, bake bread by hand. These jobs hardly exist anymore.

Of course this did not imply that all jobs disappeared and the economy collapsed. But the sense in which "AI is not replacing workers" is contingent on specific features of software development, not about automation in general.

zkmon5• 7 months ago

I did mean "all jobs across the entire economy"

anonzzzies• 7 months ago

I see AI replacing workers, but maybe it is my circles. Most of my SaaS selling friends; these are long term, as in 20+ year solution sellers in ERP, HRM, trading, banking in certain niches therein making very good money, removing most of their staff while delivering faster and better with the few senior core people they kept. Junior/Mediors can please go away...

fergie• 7 months ago

This article is actually a veiled, but sensible argument for less income tax and more wealth tax.

blitzar3• 7 months ago

To me it reads like a (sensible) argument for taxing the income of a corporation equally to the income of a human.

tga• 7 months ago

If AI replaces workers and pays taxes, should it also vote and receive social security?

sajithdilshan• 7 months ago

Also health insurance in the sense like repairing damaged components and robotic parts replacement.

d--b• 7 months ago

There are 2 reasons for taxes to exist:

1. To finance the state's activities (mostly defense, social security, education, infrastructure and healthcare)

2. To disincentivize detrimental activities like smoking or fracking.

We should tax tech companies for their off-the-charts energy consumption which is not sustainable environmentally.

But taxing AI because it replaces jobs doesn't make much sense to me as the technology is supposed to produce more stuff for less overall human labour.

If the goal is to avoid concentration of wealth, governments should tax wealthy companies/individuals and redistribute by subsiding activities that are not as revenue generating but play other significant role in society, like reduce dependency on foreign imports or you know cough health cough care cough.

hatefulheart• 7 months ago

Unrelated to the article but I want to address something that really rubs me up the wrong way about comments on HN.

I recall the ML phase we had before the “AI” phase and I do not remember anyone disputing that complex mathematical models can shift the economy, make or break jobs, the whole shebang.

What really irks me about comments like “AI will/won’t xyz” is the muddying of the waters by the word AI. It’s utterly meaningless but because it means nothing it has so much power. For example:

“Statistical models will take over middle class jobs”

“AI will take over middle class jobs”

In my mind, these two statements are equivalent in what they are actually saying but the latter closes off any reasonable discussion and lets the looney bin users on here (of which there are many) start with their basilisk song and dance and all the absolutely insane hot takes that come with it.

KoftaBob• 7 months ago

Maybe you could have a system where, in the extreme case, a fully automated company with just a few executives gets taxed on a fixed percentage of its revenue. For every human employee they hire, they can deduct 110% of that person’s total compensation (salary + benefits) from the revenue that’s subject to tax.

That way it’s beneficial in both directions: if they stay fully automated, they’re effectively helping to fund something like a UBI through higher taxes on their automation-driven profits. But they’re also strongly incentivized to hire humans anywhere it actually makes sense, because every real job they create directly reduces their tax burden.

aetherspawn2• 7 months ago

Well for starters, robots shouldn’t be tax deductible because you get a net deduction already from not paying wages, so you should pay maximum tax on their purchase price.

(Otherwise you would buy a robot.. tax deduct it, then pay less tax by not paying wages, which basically means humans would be paying tax to offset the cost of corporates buying robot to replace their own jobs which doesn’t seem fair)

Plus, they should probably add a 50% VAT or something like that on initial purchase, which covers displaced tax for at least 1-2 years and can help cover any initial teething issues or increases in social services.

I personally don’t think I can deal with living in a society where robots are so cheap that within 5 years or whatever there’s 2-3 times the human population worth of robots. Tax it all to hell, because that sounds maddening.

aetherspawn2• 7 months ago

You know in an ideal world, maybe these robots don’t last that long, but they still end up slightly cheaper than workforce, so we just tax the hell out of them and give all the money back to the people as UBI and that’s how we achieve the UBI utopia.

Or maybe we treat them like motor cars and make people register them on an annual basis if they’re going to use them commercially… like $30k/year or something.

corobo2• 7 months ago

maybe these robots don’t last that long

Landfills full of broken robots is totally something humans would do haha

veunes5• 7 months ago

Yep, if robots really become that cheap and widespread, it could dramatically shift the balance of power in society

epolanski3• 7 months ago

Interesting how this argument is only popping now that technology is threatening white collar workers.

Automation has been shoving blue collars out of the job market for a century.

A single farmer can do with his machinery today what took a dozen of people just 50 years ago.

Manufacturing has been super automated long ago.

Even in commerce automated checkout has been replacing workers for more than a decade.

In any case such a tax is not only pointless but actively dangerous, as all it achieves is making countries without such a tax more competitive.

cubefox4• 7 months ago

It's dangerous but not pointless. If we get human mass unemployment, someone has to pay for them, and if the companies offering the AI sit in the US, most countries won't be able tax OpenAI & Co directly.

HPsquared• 7 months ago

If anything, US AI companies will be eating the lunches of workers from all over the world. It'll be like a service export.

mlrtime2• 7 months ago

What makes you think this argument is popping? Or that it's only being discussed now, because of 1 article on a domain I've never heard of?

msopena• 7 months ago

ElPais is the most important (by number of readers) Spanish newspaper.

veunes5• 7 months ago

I think the current debate is less about whether automation happens and more about where the gains go

Ajedi327• 7 months ago

The same place they've always gone: to consumers purchasing the products made by those automated processes.

The average person now is far wealthier in terms of actual purchasing power than the average person 100 years ago, and that's largely because of automation making everything cheaper.

ozmodiar2• 7 months ago

I'm open to the idea that companies need much larger barriers to functioning internationally. Not just because of their ability to pump money overseas, but also because they are often used to blatantly further the security goals of their parent countries (looking at you two USA and China, but everyone able to, seems to do it).

Maybe the current system would've worked if it was built on many more small companies. These monolithic corporations funneling power upward are the death of civilization, and leadership are clearly high on their own farts. Or just want to be on top in a new feudal age.

zanellato19• 7 months ago

This also makes labor laws much less effective because the companies move countries to avoid them.

estearum2• 7 months ago

This has been a question since at least the industrial revolution.

Perhaps the more interesting bit is that you only seemed to have noticed it when it is asked about white collar workers?

shagie• 7 months ago

It's been around for nearly a decade.

Taxing Robots : Easier Said Than Done (2017) https://www.ctf.ca/EN/EN/Newsletters/Canadian_Tax_Focus/2017...

Robots, technological change and taxation (2017) https://www.taxjournal.com/articles/robots-technological-cha...

Why robots should be taxed if they take people's jobs (2017) https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/mar/22/robots-tax-...

marvinblum• 7 months ago

Of course not, otherwise the rich wouldn't get richer and that would be bad for power consolidation. Everything is moving into this direction, so why should it be different with AI?

We had this discussions for years with factory machines, and nothing came out of it. Don't get me wrong, I hate having taxes for everything (living in Germany with ~65% total tax strain for me if you include everything), but this is about power and stealing other peoples work.

singingwolfboy• 7 months ago

https://archive.ph/trS1i

refurb6• 7 months ago

Should tax the cotton gin because it replaced workers? How about computers?

leviliebvin• 7 months ago

If AI replaces workers, we wouldn't have an economy. It would probably be the end of capitalism. Or at least the end of the consumerism driven capitalism that we have known since the end of WWII. I don't know what would follow but it probably wouldn't be pretty. Honestly at that point, I could see the end of humanity. If truly we get to the point that machine intelligence is more capable and people are entirely marginalized then it's game over. At best a few human specimen end up on display in zoos, but maybe machines might not even have any use for zoos, since they can just share "experience" digitally.

doener• 7 months ago

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.

harperlee• 7 months ago

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 your political kneejerk, explore that, but playing tax sci-fi is distracting and thus dangerous.

bruce5114• 7 months ago

I'm not sure I'm following your thought on capital gains tax.

Capital Gain tax occurs when you sell an asset for more than you paid for it.

AI (software) is not an asset, and I'm not sure how you'd sell it. Computers and robots are assets (although they typically depreciate not appreciate.)

Either way capital gains tax is applied to the asset not the productivity of the asset. The productivity in turn is taxed as part of income tax.

Perhaps I have misunderstood your point though?

slowmovintarget• 7 months ago

The real issue should not be whether they're paying the government. The issue is whether they're paying us for taking the human content of the last two thousand years and baking it into their generators.

How do we get royalties on this, like our share of the oil proceeds if we were citizens of Qatar? How do we trade our share of the contribution? There's twenty years of my posting on Reddit, Slashdot, HN, and other forums, that we know for a fact has been used in these frontier models. Great... where's my royalty check?

Pay us, not the government. We'll have to pay taxes regardless, and yes, close the tax loopholes on security-based capital gains (don't tax me for all the investment in my primary residence, that's a double dip).

I heard this called "Coasian" economics (as in Coase). I'm not sure what that actually means, though.

Treegarden2• 7 months ago

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 that work and this automation does not get taxed.

Following that line of thinking makes sense, but it also contradicts the core benefit of automation, which is to delete non-needed work, make things cheaper, and make the value creator richer.

If the goal of redistribution is usually that “more” people reach a higher standard of living, then adding taxes and friction to processes like automation may conflict with that goal, given that automation is arguably one of the strongest natural drivers of higher living standards overall.

Of course, the counterpoint to “what and how much should the state provide” is “who should pitch in, and how much,” which is what you’re focusing on. I mostly agree that everyone should be taxed fairly, but I also see many exemption cases, because taxes are friction and we often want certain things to be frictionless. For example, I would oppose taxes on life-saving surgeries. But where do you draw the line? What about automation that indirectly enables or improves life-saving surgery?

mannanj• 7 months ago

its not in the convo because these capital high intensities are the ones lobbying and owning the politicians. they're each other friends. taxes were always intended even in this country to be a thing applied to serfdom: we weren't in reality immune from the conditions we aimed to flee from Great Britain where kings and queens gained qualified immunity and sovereign status - sometimes it seems like are just a "free" slave nation.

paul7986• 7 months ago

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 regulation any AI company can and or will juice their algorithms so their AI system becomes cocaine for the millions of lonely to unsatisfied people out there.

My friend has a partner of 30 years but their relationship is that of roommates. If you think she is not you that might be correct but you know someone like her and possibly many like her. Unsatisfied, not able to get that movie type love / romance / fantasy and now unfetterd AI can get these people hooked like cocaine and into the depth of zero reality!

jimbokun9• 7 months ago

What is the correct capital gains tax rate?

dzhiurgis3• 7 months ago

So the remaining 3 workers will be paying 100% of tax. Doesn’t seem fair to me.

llsf12• 7 months ago

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 capital gain is not much , but since we have only a handful of employees, that is enough to pay everyone a decent wage, after paying for the factory itself, source materials and energy.

How much tax do we expect to get from this gizmo company ? 10 years ago, to produce the same gizmos, I needed 5,000 employees, the unit price was way higher, and had higher revenue. But since AI and dark factories came, the prices cratered, instead of 5,000 jobs, we only have 5 jobs to produce the same.

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) ?

I am wondering how best to solve that equation ?

yibg3• 7 months ago

It is already taxed as capital gains though. Software (including AI), if sold either in isolation or with the entire company does trigger capital gains considerations.

If you're referring to some equivalent of wealth tax or inverse of accounting for deprecations in terms of assets, then that seems pretty problematic. 1) how do you asset the value of something until someone pays something for it? Unlike homes, where you can compare roughly to those around you, this seems much more dynamic for software / AI. 2) Let's say we are able to assess the value, so now a startup with software but no revenue has to pay taxes? Where does the money come from?

paxiongmap• 7 months ago

In a capitalist system, capital makes the rules for everyone. This is why capital earns more than labour. System working as intended.

wodenokoto• 7 months ago

Sorta depends on where one draws the line, but the line you are drawing, suggest there should be no government, so "system not working as intended"

avianlyric• 7 months ago

A capitalist system is built on the idea that holders of capital actually deploy that capital, rather than horde it.

If capital holders don’t actually deploy that capital and compete with each other, then you don’t have a capitalist system anymore. You have a feudal system, where asset holders extract resources through rents, rather than capital deployment and risk taking.

stingraycharles• 7 months ago

It’s much easier to tax the general population than businesses, as they don’t push back as much.

It’s the same pattern everywhere around the world (perhaps there are a few exceptions). Businesses can be much more creative with tax evasion as well.

pixl973• 7 months ago

Yep, concentration of wealth leads to a smaller group of people that buy their way out of taxation leading to further concentration of wealth and services falling apart for the masses.

JKCalhoun4• 7 months ago

Businesses can play the game where they shop around various municipalities and get them in a race-to-the-bottom on tax breaks if they move their business to their community.

qeternity• 7 months ago

It’s much easier to tax the general population than businesses, as they don’t push back as much.

Businesses don't pay taxes. People do. Every dime that a corporation pays is a reduction of capital returns to shareholders, or a reduction of investment into business activity, both of which are taxed again by the people who ultimately receive the capital.

ivape2• 7 months ago

You can’t ask someone to pay taxes if they have a bigger, cheaper army.

dns_snek4• 7 months ago

I wouldn't discount the collective power and ingenuity of a few billion oppressed people.

xzjis• 7 months ago

What's crazy is that productivity per employee just keeps increasing year after year, but successive neoliberal governments continue to lower corporate taxes. They should be doing the exact opposite! Taxes should be raised as productivity increases! AI is just one more tool that gradually increases productivity, among others.

lm28469• 7 months ago

but successive neoliberal governments continue to lower corporate taxes.

By itself it wouldn't be a problem, the problem is at the same time they raise taxes for people doing OK, and salaries are mostly stagnating.

Armisael16• 7 months ago

Why should productivity and corporate tax rates be correlated at all, up or down? The link there is not obvious.

kortilla4• 7 months ago

If productivity increases, margins increase. When margins increase any business in a competitive environment will have to lower its prices in response to any other business lowering prices that got those automation gains.

Productivity increases result in lower prices in any competitive market.

davidguetta• 7 months ago

It's the right thing. Let's say one compaagny makes everything.

Then it should be asked to give a part of it for free. Not necessarily money by the way.

veunes5• 7 months ago

If AI really is just another capital amplifier, then the problem isn't new, AI just makes the existing imbalance harder to ignore

SketchySeaBeast• 7 months ago

It removes a layer of abstraction from capital to production. With AI the only question is if the compute is available to purchase, once it is, you can produce with it.

Of course, the question then is who is consuming the production, but we're not quite there yet.

int_19h16• 7 months ago

It's the ultimate capital amplifier. The end goal - AGI - essentially means the ability to derive wealth from capital directly, without any pesky middlemen such as laborers who need to be paid. The endgame is capital without labor.

But, of course, in such a society, the people who don't own the robots - i.e. most of us - become "economically unnecessary".

the_real_cher• 7 months ago

I'm all for raising taxes is on the rich but the government is extremely fiscally irresponsible.

The current interest on our national debt is greater than our military spending.

So if you increase taxes some people think it would just be throwing it into the money fire of Washington.

There needs to be a lot of changes in D.C.: term limits in congress, citizens united needs to be repealed, erc etc

ceejayoz7• 7 months ago

The current interest on our national debt is greater than our military spending.

For quite some time, my mortgage interest was larger than my principal.

That didn’t make it fiscally irresponsible.

dv_dt• 7 months ago

The government is fiscally irresponsible fundamentally because the rich have successfully lobbied to prevent taxes from being collectible in sufficient quantity to balance the budget. Once you're at the point where the gap cannot politically be closed - "responsible" budgeting is just an exercise in posturing and lobbying exercises.

fzeroracer3• 7 months ago

When Trump did the whole tax cut thing in 2017, it massively blew up the national debt. This is because the rich got massive tax cuts.

The government is fiscally irresponsible by design, because the government is ran by the plutocrats with all the incentives to give themselves more money at the cost of everyone else.

classified• 7 months ago

And it makes the governments that have been allowing this more a part of organized crime than of anything else. It's unmitigated corruption.

gjsman-10006• 7 months ago

The top 1% already pays more than 40% of all federal income tax at a 26.09% effective rate. The bottom 50% has an effective rate of 3.7% and contributes only 3% of all tax revenues.

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...

How about the rich say that 50% of the economy should pay their fair share?

titzer• 7 months ago

If we limited individual wealth to $999 million--just outright capped it, and enforced that--it would not impact these people in the slightest.

What it would impact is how easily these people could influence the political system and get themselves out of trouble.

At $400 billion net worth, Elon Musk could retire one hundred thousand times. He literally wrote multi-million dollar checks to various politicians and ran an illegal pay-for-votes scheme in Pennsylvania. And he'll face zero consequences for it.

komali28• 7 months ago

I did a bit of mild googling.

1% of Americans control 30% of the wealth of the nation, and apparently 12% of property.

It's more than reasonable that people with that much wealth to their name pay the vast majority of the taxes, as it used to be.

From a nation building perspective, there's no reason to allow a couple hundred people to wield 52,000,000,000,000$ worth of assets. It means the economy has gotten far too clumpy and needs some redistribution. This isn't even really all that anti-capitalist. Capitalism can't survive long term without budding up against a government that regulates it.

smallmancontrov14• 7 months ago

income tax

They don't get money through income! They get most of it through capital gains or unrealized capital gains which are taxed at special low rates and zero rates respectively.

It's transparently self-serving and completely indefensible -- though I'm sure you'll try.

fzeroracer3• 7 months ago

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.

iso16316• 7 months ago

How about the rich say that 50% of the economy should pay their fair share?

Someone with $1b of assets gets far more value from a modern stable western society than someone with $10k of assets

micromacrofoot• 7 months ago

Top 1% of the US holds 30% of the country's wealth

Bottom 50% only 2% of wealth

50% of the economy my ass, these takes don't even pass basic accounting logic these days

oddmade• 7 months ago

In essence...

Tax not paid by ultra wealthy goes back into he system as loans that extract interest that in turn is used to buy assets sold to pay for interest, those are then rented back to the system to extract more interest.

In essence by allowing no tax to be paid by the ultra wealthy, we facilitate the death of the middle class and transfer of everything to the very few - with mathematical precision.

Ultimately we need to ask ourselves why we have a society, what's it's purpose.

For the few or the many ?

vladms2• 7 months ago

While I probably prefer a society that is more "for the many", I can't exclude the possibility that some people have different preferences and would not want to impose my opinion.

Considering this, everybody might have to make (at some point in their lives) hard choices regarding where they choose to live. Yes, one should fight to improve the society one is living in, but there is also a saying "only the fool persists in their folly" ...

koolba• 7 months ago

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.

Are you talking about taxing unrealized capital gains?

Because for the situation where capital is directly replacing labor, the income generation is taxed regardless of the whether it’s generated by a human or machine.

If I hire people to make and sell hot dogs, they pay taxes on their wages. If I build an automated hot dog vending machine, I still pay taxes on the profits of selling those same hot dogs.

One can’t spend any of the money until it becomes personal assets. So what is not being taxed?

If I keep them in the company, I pay corporate tax on profits (22%) for retained earnings. And then I’d have to pay dividend tax (either 15% or 20%) atop those retained earnings to pay them out to myself as income. Or I pay myself a salary and pay regular income tax on the full amount.

Due to our progressive tax brackets and double taxation of dividends, both options end up with larger tax rates than when dealing purely with low wage human labor. We as a society collect more in taxes from one high income earner than multiple low income ones.

tossandthrow4• 7 months ago

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.

amelius2• 7 months ago

The fundamental problem of our time is that even capital in the form of bricks makes more money than most kinds of labor.

burnerRhodov22• 7 months ago

I was mind blown when i found that this is a major investment thesis in argentina.

Nasrudith• 7 months ago

That is the opposite of a problem - it emerges because we have tools that make things more efficient than just throwing toiling bodies at it. We had economies which were based upon it, it was called slavery. Capital compounding its gains through better capital is how we get progress. The presense or absense of the capital advantage is part of what separates third world wages from first world.

The industrial era problem isn't capital but that economies of scale encourage consolidation heavily and make running small business an even more uphill battle. There is at least a counterbalancing force of competitive pressure and antitrust to promote some splitting for innovation's sake as opposed to just one big stagnant monopoly winning out just because it is biggest.

haizhung4• 7 months ago

Very well put. I am working on tooling that will likely increase developer productivity by a large factor; and will most likely be used to lay off more developers as their labor is no longer required.

I often ask myself whether that is ethical or not. But in the end, it’s not the tooling that’s unethical. Productivity increases are good for everyone, under normal circumstances.

It’s the fact that all the gains are being collected by the already uber-wealthy that’s wrong.

hack_edu• 7 months ago

If your tooling gains attention, will you take seed money from rich VCs?

When the product succeeds and you get offers to exit, would you sell to the uber-wealthy? They will exploit your user's data and collect the gains.

Those are the questions you should be honestly asking yourself when considering your own ethics. What's your price?

legacynl• 7 months ago

I often ask myself whether that is ethical or not. But in the end, it’s not the tooling that’s unethical. Productivity increases are good for everyone, under normal circumstances.

So if I'm reading your comment right, you think it would be ethical under normal circumstances, but also believe we don't live under those normal circumstances? In that case i think the answer you're looking for is: it is not ethical to develop these tools under the current circumstances.

zozbot2342• 7 months ago

This is a bad deal. 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. (This argument also applies to AI, of course. Since AI doesn't just instantly wipe out all jobs, there will be many workers that will benefit from it and will thus be quite able to fund their governments and social systems.) If you wish to tax some forms of "capital", or rather assets, you should focus on pure rent-generating assets like valuable urban land, or local exclusivity rights to parts of the EM spectrum.

robinhoode• 7 months ago

This is a bad deal. Capital makes the marginal worker more productive, not less.

Why should workers care about being more productive if they do not reap the rewards in terms of wages?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_of_wages_from_produ...

airstrike5• 7 months ago

If your argument were true we should set taxes on capital to zero, which is quite obviously a bad idea.

ToucanLoucan• 7 months ago

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 heavily than the returns earned by ownership. One is tangible effort, the other is an abstraction backed by law. If anything, taxing capital should be the baseline, because it's the least tied to survival. Historically, when America was at its most broadly prosperous, capital gains and corporate profits were taxed at far higher rates than today.

Point three: AI intensifies that calculus. If AI is deployed by capital to further replace or devalue labor, then taxing only the worker is punishing the displaced while rewarding the displacer. That's pure extraction. If we want social systems to survive, the burden has to fall on the owners of the machines, not the people being replaced by them.

Genuinely one of the largest and most destructive ills of our society right now is that so tremendously more of our shared prosperity as a system is directed to those who do the least to create it.

grumpymuppet• 7 months ago

It's not a matter of a "deal" to be made or agreed to, it's a matter of paying a fair share of the cost to organize a society. When Capital gets to reap dual benefits of revenue from business prospects and lobbying government directly to set the tax rules, then it can't ALSO offload outlaying to the public good that it DEPENDS on to make a profit.

Avoiding tax through various loopholes that Capital gets a seat at the table to help craft, while benefitting from externalizing the costs to taxing labor is just corruption.

cced• 7 months ago

You can tax the worker and she will still be better off than if you had taxed the capital, due to greater productivity.

This assumes the worker is the one benefiting from the productivity gains. We're just worked more and we don't get the added value.

navane• 7 months ago

Workers make capital productive.

SecretDreams2• 7 months ago

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.

So the government is going to fix this, right? Right...?

storf45• 7 months ago

Yes by having the Federal Reserve print more money!

int_19h16• 7 months ago

Most governments in the world exist to protect the interests of capital owners. Which makes sense - the creation of states in the first place was an act of, shall we say, radical capital acquisition.

Gud• 7 months ago

I could not agree more.

Another fundamental problem is that the means of production are concentrated into the hands of a few.

vladms2• 7 months ago

Are they though? At least for AI/software the last 30 years were fantastic to have universal access to means of production (compilers, tools, operating systems, models, you name it).

I am more worried about the capability of people to use the free means of production (more precisely improve education) rather than the concentration.

Edit: and to remove any doubt, I do agree that taxation of capital is completely badly done now, but I do not think the capital is about owning the means of production but about the capital (effort) required to organize people to use the (mostly) free means of production.

jmyeet• 7 months ago

It's hard to truly comprehend the damage Red Scare did to all of our collective lives. The Post-WW2 era utterly destroyed the labor movement and pretty much any form of collective action. And all but about 10,000 people are worse off for it.

So many commnents here, yours included, make perfect sense when you simply look at them through the lens of the workers' relationship to the means of production.

Automation could be a good thing. It could mean we need to do less work and have more leisure time. Instead it gets concentrated in the hands of very few so they can become even wealthier. And the resultant layoffs are used to extract free labor from the people who remain and suppress their wages, all to eke out more profits.

knuppar• 7 months ago

there is hope for HN!!!

lab14• 7 months ago

Is there any time in human history where this wasn't the case? Genuinely curious.

haizhung4• 7 months ago

After world war 2, most of the western world had wealth taxes. The US had eg. >90% income taxes, and death taxes of up to 77% on inherited wealth.

You know, exactly that span of time that everyone agrees on being really prosperous.

throwaway638637• 7 months ago

We should do what the moslems do. 2.5% wealth tax on everybody above a minimal wealth threshold!

andsoitis4• 7 months ago

The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems is

Are you sure capital owners do not contribute to our states and financial systems?

For instance, Jeff Bezos is worth $238 billion even though Amazon has a $2.6 trillion market cap. That's $2.4 trillion of value created for other shareholders plus trillions more for employees, customers, suppliers, governments, and other stakeholders.

Jensen Huang is worth $164 billion while NVIDIA’s market cap is $5 trillion. That’s $4.8 trillion of value for other people (ignoring value created for non-equity stakeholders).

etc.

I'm not saying that there should not ALSO be other ways to force contribution (e.g. via taxes), but to say they do not contribute at all is false.

code_for_monkey2• 7 months ago

I would say they dont contribute. I don't think Jeff Bezos has contributed anything positive, at all. He's managed to become insanely rich in a system that rewards bad behavior, so what? All that value isnt doing anything.

elevatortrim• 7 months ago

You are assuming:

1. Value created for other shareholders is a good thing

2. $ "value" directly translates to actual resources or services

3. These employees and customers would not get the same or more value elsewhere if Amazon did not exist

4. This "value" created by Amazon is better compared to the alternative (such as more resources used locally instead of global trade)

Salgat2• 7 months ago

That's $2.4 trillion of value created for other shareholders plus trillions more for employees, customers, suppliers, governments, and other stakeholders.

That's not Bezos' doing alone, that's Bezos plus over a million workers that did that. If Bezos never existed in history, someone else would have filled in that market. We need to stop this myth that a few men alone create all this value and that without them we'd still be dragging plows through the mud for our farms.

gortok• 7 months ago

One thing to point out that is lost in these arguments of “they create value for the shareholders”.

Folks that own a vast amount of stock do not pay taxes on that stock. They own the shares, and they take out loans against those shares. At some point they rollover or pay off those loans by selling some shares, but the shares have increased in value significantly in that time, or they’ve been granted new shares.

When we say “<business> has created value for shareholders”, it’s said in a way that implies that somehow that wealth creation makes its way into the tax system by virtue of the fact the wealth was ‘created’. It does not.

trimethylpurine• 7 months ago

of all* time.

unboxingelf• 7 months ago

I argue there is a more fundamental problem with the money: Debasement.

Debasement is an invisible tax and its effects far outweigh individuals bypassing taxes.

IAmBroom3• 7 months ago

... which is a different topic.

This thread is about the fair taxation of AI, if any.

jimbokun9• 7 months ago

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.

mrwrong• 7 months ago

Can we have a grown up discussion

starting your reply with an insult, great way to spark "grown up discussion"

adventured• 7 months ago

The whole reason for the use of "pay their fair share" while never actually defining what the fair share is supposed to be. It's solely about hit & run propaganda. Avoiding discussing actual numbers is a requirement to the politics.

n1b0m• 7 months ago

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 sometimes be used as a deduction.

ceejayoz7• 7 months ago

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 more, as long as Thiel waits to withdraw his money until April 2027, when he is six months shy of his 60th birthday, he will never have to pay a penny of tax on those billions."

insane_dreamer3• 7 months ago

Numbers, from the article:

In the United States, for example, about 85% of federal tax revenue comes from labor income,

That means only 15% is coming from all other taxes, including corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, and other taxes on the wealthy (estate taxes), mostly because they find creative ways -- and loopholes by design -- that allow them to reduce those taxes significantly.

ASalazarMX• 7 months ago

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 middle class, a significant percent of the population would be exempt from taxes by the sheer insignificance of their contribution, and I don't mean only the poorest people.

golergka• 7 months ago

Most of the capital is owned (through pension funds and then different investment funds) by completely ordinary people who put their completely ordinary savings into it and get completely ordinary pensions out of it.

So you are effectively suggesting to forcibly take their money from them and then give it back, but through a corrupt and bureaucratic system of the state.

SunshineTheCat• 7 months ago

The top 1% of earners in the US pay 40% of all income taxes.

https://usafacts.org/articles/who-pays-the-most-income-tax/

fizx• 7 months ago

This isn't about income.

bal00ns• 7 months ago

This covers federal income taxes only, excluding payroll taxes such as Social Security and Medicare. Including those the top 1% pays ~25% of all federal taxes while earning ~22% of all income.

youarentrightjr• 7 months ago

The top 1% of earners aren't the capital owners, not even close.

slacka• 7 months ago

You're missing the point. The effective tax rate of many billionaires is lower than ours. "Musk with a fortune of $244 billion, paid an average effective tax rate of 24% from 2018 to 2020". In other years it was as low as 3%[2].

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/income-taxes-billionaire-tax-ra...

[2] https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...

esalman• 7 months ago

Top 1% have more income (income inequality is a thing). Taking away 40% income would hit the bottom 99% much harder than it would affect the life of top 1%. 50% of renters spend >30% on housing, 25% spend >50%.

40% figure is also based on individual income taxes. It drops significantly if you consider other sources (payroll etc).

Top 1% also receive preferential tax treatment and benefits disproportionately from policy changes.

mostertoaster• 7 months ago

The fact that people think, capital owners who actually provide employment and produce useful things and do better the better they serve the consumer even when their motives aren’t altruistic (and when they are altruistic it is even better) should be taxed more so the giant government corporation can make bureaucrats pockets fatter and waste a bunch of money doing inefficient things is more of a fundamental problem.

hyperjeff• 7 months ago

i haven’t had my coffee yet, but i’m going to need to see this sentence diagrammed out.

int_19h16• 7 months ago

Capital owners don't produce useful things. Their workers do.

And so you can easily turn that argument around: the workers who actually produce the useful things are, for some reason, taxed higher than the owner who didn't lift a finger to produce anything, but is entitled to all the profits by virtue of being the capital owner.

asgraham• 7 months ago

I was so with you the first half of that. But the notion that everything should be capitalism is just as wrong as the notion that nothing should be capitalism (or, that capitalism only leads to bad things; obviously wrong but somehow a broadly accepted truism).

Capitalism works when a market works; capitalism fails when a market fails. Healthcare is a great example, because there’s an obvious and inherent imbalance in demand vs supply. Firefighting is another great example. These also have externalities to the community as a whole that everyone gets, even when you don’t pay/need the service; so it makes sense to make everyone pay (taxes). Even if you never have a child, even if you send your kids to private school, you live in a society that could only exist because of a (formerly, relatively) high standard of public education. So everyone pays for schools.

The idea of government bureaucrats lining their pockets is also (formerly, relatively) ridiculous: who would get into US government bureaucracy to make money? They are all (formerly, relatively) doing it almost uniformly because they believe in the mission, because they would almost all make more money going private.

tt248• 7 months ago

Rich people pay pretty much all taxes in the United States.

platevoltage3• 7 months ago

Yeah, and they should pay more.

EGreg2• 7 months ago

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, without paying tax to the government. Taxes should be levied on companies and robots, not humans doing everyday things.

The employer knows exactly how much they are paying each employee, and they already have accountants on staff. Why create "bullshit jobs" just for employees to file this same exact information again?

So yeah, we shouldn't wait for AI to replace workers, to abolish the individual income tax for individuals. It should have been done a long time ago. Employers can pay the tax (as they do with FICA). And in fact, we're going to have to have a tax regime that taxes robots, which would become the primary economic actors soon anyway. If corporations can have legal personhood, surely robots can too LMAO.

dennis_jeeves22• 7 months ago

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.

rayiner3• 7 months ago

Economists generally agree that taxing capital owners is bad policy and taxes should be directed at consumers: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-...

Three: Eliminate the corporate income tax. Completely. If companies reinvest the money into their businesses, that's good. Don't tax companies in an effort to tax rich people.
Four: Eliminate all income and payroll taxes. All of them. For everyone. Taxes discourage whatever you're taxing, but we like income, so why tax it? Payroll taxes discourage creating jobs. Not such a good idea. Instead, impose a consumption tax, designed to be progressive to protect lower-income households.

Our fundamental problem is not that we don't tax Jeff Bezos. It's that we don't tax the people who have multiple boxes of Chinese goods coming from Amazon to their houses every day.

unethical_ban3• 7 months ago

Taxes discourage whatever you're taxing, but we like consumption, so why tax it? Sales taxes discourage velocity of money. Not such a good idea. Instead, impose an income tax, designed to be progressive to protect lower income households.

WalterBright6• 7 months ago

The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems

The top 1% pay 40% of the Federal income tax.

marliechiller• 7 months ago

The top 1% arent the problem. The top <=0.001% are the problem.

dmitrygr• 7 months ago

  > 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.

strangattractor• 7 months ago

Interesting discussion concerning this on Prof G at around 35 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EklEzXBQP9U&t=1353s

GFischer• 7 months ago

I don't understand why socialists or communists don't tax the means of production accordingly, if they don't have money, take partial ownership (or complete ownership and turn it into a co-op or something).

Owners of capital and means of production have succesfully gamed the system and most of the tax burden falls on us middle class idiots that pay taxes on our work.

raincole• 7 months ago

I think no income should be taxes. We should tax assets.

hahahacorn• 7 months ago

I’m beginning to realize a common thread of “HN commenters completely misunderstanding economics” is that evaluation of policy only with N=1 Company Per Industry.

Competition is the foundation of all of the positives of market dynamics. Nothing good happens in a capitalist society without competition.

Assuming that any gains in productivity will exist _solely_ to fatten the pockets of corporate executives makes sense if you think that all goods of an industry are made by one company.

However, this isn’t what happens. Pricing in a competitive environment is largely driven by what producers can profitably outcompete and deliver. Not the maximum they can charge the consumer…

INTPenis• 7 months ago

Haha this is the problem, we're taxing work instead of taxing wealth.

If AI is generating wealth for someone, should we tax it?

azaras• 7 months ago

Reduce human working hours.

gorgoiler• 7 months ago

There could also be a moral case for dropping taxation on industrial inputs altogether, and tax solely on the outputs. That would mean zero rating the labor input. No more income tax or income related welfare tax, which this article posits will be dropping away anyway as more automation arrives. Instead, the outputs of the economy would be taxed.

Revenue would then come from the consumption of economic output via a sales tax, most likely a new, progressive tax based on your annual spending rather than a flat percentage of every sale. It could be applied on the manufacturers profits via corporation tax but taxes are for the benefit of actual people so I’d lean on the former rather than the latter. The more you rely on corporation tax the more vulnerable you are to international shenanigans.

How would you feel if your take home pay nearly doubled but you had to pay X% of your credit card bill to the taxman?

veunes5• 7 months ago

Taxes are paid by people and legal entities, not tools. The real issue isn't that machines aren't taxed, it's that our tax base is still heavily tied to labor

gred• 7 months ago

If the telephone replaces errand boys, should it also pay taxes?

bloomingeek• 7 months ago

If corporations are considered "legal persons", when they break the law, should they go to jail? If a corporation was forced to shut down because of law breaking, which would be a terrible burden to the workers and the customers, would that lead to corporations becoming more responsible "persons"?

https://www.npr.org/2014/07/28/335288388/when-did-companies-...

dns_snek4• 7 months ago

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 labor, it shouldn't require substantial human labor to buy (in "reasonable" quantities, however you want to define and enforce that).

Without understanding the "end game" of automation (decades+ from now) it feels like we're just sleepwalking into an absurd reality where a few trillionaires own the world's fully automated food supply chain, but buying food somehow requires just as much labor as it does today.

exe342• 7 months ago

I think the idea is that the trillionaires won't need us at all when the food supply is fully automated. They might keep a small population for genetic diversity, but that's about it.

mlrtime2• 7 months ago

Transition periods are always difficult, but they've always reached some equilibrium. Right now the spread between the two seem higher (not sure they are) but the system will bring them closer together.

lux44• 7 months ago

There is no "system" to bring them together. Historically only revolutions and mainly violent protests have helped.

Loughla• 7 months ago

World wars, revolutions, and violence are how we've reached equilibrium in the past.

We could, conceivably, learn from our mistakes and do something different now. But we're not.

veunes5• 7 months ago

The end game you're describing (abundance with minimal labor) only works socially if we deliberately redesign distribution, not just production

AndrewKemendo7• 7 months ago

This is the only correct answer.

I believe unfortunately it’s intractable because humans cannot successfully align incentives and actions at a scale large enough required to solve it

Treegarden2• 7 months ago

I see a natural equilibrium with a tension: automation (also through AI) causes unit economics to drop and results in cheaper prices. At the same time, salaries for contributors grow because their impact is so high. So you end up with a new equilibrium of much cheaper prices and much higher salaries. What, however, about the people who can’t contribute? IMO the most natural and fair approach is to support (through whatever means) people’s “education”, allowing them to upgrade their skills so that they can contribute. IMO this leads to a new tension: not rich vs poor, or useful vs useless, but people who can up-level their skills vs those who don’t. And I think, at its extreme, it boils down to this: how much plasticity does your brain have? Because every other constraint, society can adapt or accommodate for.

zwnow6• 7 months ago

salaries for contributors grow

I dont see that happening

jarpschope5• 7 months ago

Yeah, that definitely won't work at scale. The bar for what constitutes being "educated" keeps increasing. Previously it was knowing how to code, now it is having an ML PhD, for example. At the same time, AI keeps getting more and more capable, so no matter how much "education" you have, AI will eventually get to you.

In any case, the argument won't work for majority of the population without a college degree. Are you going to have 50+ year old truck drivers upskilling in a fancy new tool to keep a job? And again, how long until that new skill you upgraded them to is now done by AI as well.

Arkhaine_kupo2• 7 months ago

That is a game thoery approach but it completely fails in the face of reality.

The reality is that the floor to become "useful" is relatively low, which means the few billioanires have a large pool of potentially useful people of which they only employ some, leading to no greater salaries due to labour competition.

The other potentially useful workers cannot pool together and compete as the barrier of entry in the sector is prohibitely high.

So a natural moat emerges over cost of setting up a company, workers beg for a job of which they will take for a small wage and a few billioanires control the market.

This is a much closer approximation to the market we currently see

9dev3• 7 months ago

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 affecting prices much.

notyourwork2• 7 months ago

Thank you, I keep reading these discussions and rarely see anyone touch on power and environmental factors.

qwertygnu• 7 months ago

How does more pollution/waste equal higher consumer cost? Do you mean because we'll have to pay more taxes because we'll need more publicly funded resources to clean up the excess waste? Or because corporations would pass the price of the fines for violating environmental regulations onto consumers?

IanCal3• 7 months ago

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.

dns_snek4• 7 months ago

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.

mitjam• 7 months ago

Labor "power" is paid, thus hours put in mostly. Hard to compare with AI. Simpler and fairer (for a start): Tax capital gains as soon as assets are used as collateral for loans.

Havoc• 7 months ago

I'm more interested in whether we even could make "it" pay taxes.

Suspect we're at a point where any single gov would struggle to control the megacorps. Not just big tech, but in general.

aszantu• 7 months ago

Capitalism can only work when there's cheap labor and someone consumes the fruit of said labor.

When nobody earns is the same as everyone earns the same amount (aka inflation) as long as there have been humans, there will be someone grabbing more than everyone else.

So question would be how do you make transition into a world where there's less paid work?

geldedus2• 7 months ago

Yet, no one is pressed to emigrate live in non-capitalist North Korea or Cuba.

ekjhgkejhgk• 7 months ago

What you're asking is equivalent to asking whether capital should pay taxes.

I used to like the phrase "that idea is deeper that it first sounds", but Enron Musk ruined that for me.

mikkupikku• 7 months ago

Brogrammers just now realizing that new technology often eliminates jobs, but think this is the first time in history this has happened because this time it's happening to them.

Automatic thread spinning machines took the jobs of spinsters. Did the machines themselves pay taxes?

elnatro• 7 months ago

No. It doesn’t make sense. Should we charge taxes to our dishwasher? People, especially non-technical people, seem to be embellished by the words “AI” and forget that that’s not more than a mathematical and computational process that seems like an intelligent being.

Funnily enough, the leader of the Sumar political party (junior member of the socialist government) was ridiculed by her words about AI (some weeks ago):

https://www.elliberal.cat/2025/11/19/yolanda-diaz-hace-el-ri...

alienbaby• 7 months ago

If it can consume public resources and has a vote, maybe?

j45• 7 months ago

If software is machinery I’m not sure how that would work.

phantom7842• 7 months ago

Perhaps some sort of tax that looks at the ratio of a company's profits (or perhaps revenues) to employees, and the tax scales up if that ratio gets too high.

Arguably, a "public good" that companies provide is employment, and as they increase automation, they reduce that "public good" and direct more of their revenue to themselves rather as salary for their employees.

eek2121• 7 months ago

The tax should also go to fund a UBI.

phantom7842• 7 months ago

Agreed. Essentially it's either you create jobs directly, or you contribute to the UBI fund.

igleria• 7 months ago

The Venn diagram of {people that are ok with paying taxes} and {people that will own the technology that replaces humans that pay taxes from their income} is probably going to show such a small intersection that... UBI or whatever is the flavor of the month will not be feasible.

nmeofthestate• 7 months ago

Should my washing machine pay income tax, and does that mean I need to register as a business to have it as an employee? So many questions raised by the automation of previously human-performed work.

_heimdall• 7 months ago

If the AI is autonomous and self-directed, sure tax the AI. If they are used as a tool owned and directed by a person or company, tax them just like we tax Ford rather than each robot currently on an assembly line.

komali28• 7 months ago

I feel like the USA is not prepared for the 50% unemployment rate it's looking at when the value of labor in many industries drops to pennies. Other countries with safety nets and socialist programs can probably switch to a UBI style economy or simply communism, but the USA is so allergic to such things I don't see anything other than chaos and collapse.

And they have allllll those guns too...

solumunus9• 7 months ago

We’ll see. I don’t understand how anyone can view this as an inevitably in the short/medium term, yet that’s how a lot of people are talking. There’s really nothing to suggest this change is imminent.

komali28• 7 months ago

Imminent or not, what jobs will remain? Fixing the robots? Technology strives to reduce cost, labor is typically the largest cost, so is it not inevitable that labor will be made mostly redundant?

stevex• 7 months ago

Where does that UBI money come from if there are 50% fewer people paying taxes? That's the problem.

komali28• 7 months ago

Governments can print money.

But yes, you're right, the core problem is that in the USA, people need to justify their existence through labor. If they can't labor, they can't justify their existence (barring the slim few outliers on benefits, who are constantly under attack for being lazy or whatever).

However, if we take a step back and just consider reality for itself, we're just talking about resource allocation. Under the current system, the allocation of resources is dependent upon how much cash any given person can command, which is ostensibly connected to the value of their labor, but in reality, is clumpy and is connected first and foremost to how much cash they or their family historically had, and secondarily how valuable their labor is to capitalism, rather than to humanity. Thus investment bankers make 9x what teachers and EMTs make.

There's no reason we need to play that game. We can simply allocate the resources along more efficient terms, such as, taking the robot-harvested food, having robots put it in self driving trains and trucks, and having it delivered to people who need food.

amdivia• 7 months ago

I think ignoring AI, some Tax formula could be found that uses the number of employees in a company compared to some measure of the economical size of the company.

(With the goal of pushing the company to create jobs proportional to its scale, or pay an additional Tax equivalent to the number of employees they could've payed for)

brap• 7 months ago

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

hagbarth• 7 months ago

I've seen this statement before. I'm not sure why my nation winning AI, whatever that means (first to AGI?), is better for me than some other nation?

nfRfqX5n• 7 months ago

If someone can’t find work they probably don’t care about the global consequences

gamblor9564• 7 months ago

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.

nrhrjrjrjtntbt• 7 months ago

That would be a window tax.

segmondy• 7 months ago

If AI doesn't replace workers, should workers that use software to be more productive pay more tax for using a smarter software?

general1465• 7 months ago

If it won't then it is effectively short circuiting whole capitalist society as we know it

If people are not working, then they have no income - Less taxes for state

If they have no income, they can't buy stuff or services - Less taxes for state

If companies can't sell stuff and services, they are going bankrupt - Less taxes for state

If state has no income from taxes, state is going bankrupt.

Consumers, Companies and Governments all will go bust if state are not going to massively and aggressively tax AI and automation. Then pay UBI to consumers so we can at least pretend that capitalism is still a thing.

exabrial2• 7 months ago

No, you should collect less taxes.

exabrial2• 7 months ago

lol I love how somehow AI is supposed to automate everything, and yet the Statists think that means government overreach needs to _increase_.

Those two things cannot possibly be true at the same time. If wealth, energy, and leisure become unlimited, we hardly have a use case for taxes.

rnernento• 7 months ago

It seems to me that since AI is built on the collective works of the workers it's replacing any profits should probably be taxed at 100%

stego-tech• 7 months ago

Yes, just not in the “one bot = one taxpayer” sense.

Look, rich countries like the United States who have been obsessed with neoliberalism and laissez-faire Capitalism have spent the past fifty years continuously slashing tax rates on everything and everyone (but particularly on the wealthy and homeowners), leading to gargantuan debts and deficits. Re-ramping that taxation on labor now, when it can’t even afford core necessities due to wage stagnation and inflation via corporate greed, would be equivalent to lighting off fireworks while pumping gas: a very bad idea.

What’s needed isn’t a simple tax increase, but a fundamental rework of the tax scheme. When a majority of wealth is coming from Capital Gains (housing profits, investment returns, etc), then that’s where a majority of tax revenue should be coming from. That’s a more effective way of taxing AI and labor, provided you also rework structures to eliminate the myriad of loopholes people and businesses use to duck taxes on that income. You’d also need to rework incentive structures to limit the collapse of labor until such time as society and government can be reworked around a post-labor future: tax penalties for layoffs by profitable firms or firms who have a disproportionate amount of workforce on income-based government welfare programs, elimination of subsidies in profitable segments of the marketplace, stringent accountability standards for government contracts, labor protections in general, job guarantees, higher minimum wage, the list goes on and on.

What frustrates me is that these sorts of posts get trotted out as “big think” arguments about AI, when in reality they’re about thirty years late to the party and woefully unaware of the complexity and risks of the issue at hand. They want to debate hypothetical minutiae instead of acknowledge the present reality: that workers are being permanently displaced by AI now (or at least by AI investment), and that the big players, despite any public statements promoting or encouraging regulation of their industry or the need to help workers, are presently doing everything in their power to stop governments from addressing either of those things lest their expansion be curtailed.

vjk800• 7 months ago

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).

mastazi• 7 months ago

Where do you live? Are tractors not taxed as motor vehicles in your country?

aarond0623• 7 months ago

Normally not unless they travel on public roads. If it's just used for farming it doesn't have to be registered.

bluedino• 7 months ago

Nope.

They even get to use fuel that has less taxes on it since they don't drive on public roads.

cj• 7 months ago

If we tax at the state level like motor vehicles, what happens when AI living in a Texas datacenter replaces 1 million jobs in Florida? The people are in Florida, but the money goes to Texas.

TuringNYC• 7 months ago

I'm not arguing for taxing AI (or tractors) -- but...if we made the wrong decision 100yrs ago, should we make the wrong decision again? It is worth debating.

immibis7• 7 months ago

The wrong decision wasn't using productivity enhancers - it was building a society around the idea that everyone MUST have a job, even in the presence of substantial productivity enhancers which massively decrease the number of jobs. We've scraped by so far... so far.

ashleyn• 7 months ago

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 tell right now. There's some scant indications we've scaled LLMs as far as they can go without another fundamental discovery similar to the attention paper in 2017. GPT-5 was underwhelming, and each new Claude Opus is an incremental improvement at best, still unable to execute an entire business idea from a single prompt. If we don't continue to see large leaps in capability like circa 2021-2022, then it can be argued jevons paradox will kick in here and at best LLMs will be a productivity multiplier for already experienced white collar workers - not a replacement for them.

All this being said, technological unemployment is not something that will be sudden or obvious, nor will human innovation always stay under jevons paradox, and I think policymakers need to seriously entertain taboo solutions for it sooner or later. Such as a WPA-style infrastructure project or basic income.

renewiltord2• 7 months ago

Basic income doesn’t do anything. We already have food stamps and so on. The largest sector of US federal spending is health and social welfare. We’d have to end pretty much all those programs to run a minuscule basic income.

CyanLite2• 7 months ago

I think you're basing AI only on modern 2025 LLMs.

If there is a magnitude increase in compute (TPUs, NPUs, etc) over the next 3-5 years then even marginal increases in LLM usability will take white collar jobs.

If there is an exponential increase in power (fusion) and compute (quantum) combined with improvements in robotics and you're in the territory where humans can entirely be replaced in all industries (blue collar, white collar, doctors, lawyers, etc).

lelandfe• 7 months ago

technological unemployment is not something that will be sudden or obvious

I already have friends experiencing technological unemployment. Programmers suddenly need backup plans. Several designers I know are changing careers. Not to mention, the voiceover artist profession will probably cease to exist besides this last batch of known voices. Writer, editor - these were dependable careers for friends, once. A friend travelled the world and did freelance copyediting for large clients.

ChatGPT was just released three years ago.

philipallstar5• 7 months ago

The same can probably be said for contemporary AI, but it's tough to tell right now

The same can't even be said for contemporary AI, because lots of the jobs it's going to replace are theoretical or hype. Self-driving cars should've been here years ago, but because AI is extremely hard to improve upon once it gets to a certain level of efficacy, they haven't happened.

The question is: should we be discussing this stuff when AI hasn't started taking all those jobs yet?

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 7 months ago

The same can probably be said for contemporary AI, but it's tough to tell right now. There's some scant indications we've scaled LLMs as far as they can go without another fundamental discovery similar to the attention paper in 2017. GPT-5 was underwhelming, and each new Claude Opus is an incremental improvement at best, still unable to execute an entire business idea from a single prompt. If we don't continue to see large leaps in capability like circa 2021-2022, then it can be argued jevons paradox will kick in here and at best LLMs will be a productivity multiplier for already experienced white collar workers - not a replacement for them.

The NBA has an incredibly high demand for 14-foot-tall basketball players, but none have shown up to apply. Similarly, if this causes our economy to increase demand for people to "execute an entire business ide from a single prompt", it does not mean unemployment can be alleviated by moving all the jobless into roles like that.

We don't need science fiction AI that will put everyone out of work for it to be ruinous. We only need half-assed AI good enough that they don't want to pay a burgerflipper to flip burgers anymore, and it'll all go to hell.

Ajedi327• 7 months ago

This argument hinges rather strongly on whether or not AI is going to create a broad, durable, and lasting unemployment effect.

I think GP's argument makes a pretty strong case that it won't, even if AI somehow successfully automates 99% of all currently existing tasks. We automated away 99% of jobs once during the agricultural revolution and it didn't result in "a broad, durable, and lasting unemployment effect" then. Quite the opposite in fact.

Maybe if AI actually automates 100% of everything then we'll need to think about this more. But that seems unlikely to happen anytime in the foreseeable future given the current trajectory of the technology. (Even 50% seems unlikely.)

falcor84• 7 months ago

each new Claude Opus is an incremental improvement at best, still unable to execute an entire business idea from a single prompt.

If your way of evaluating the progress of AI is a binary one, then you'll see no progress at all until suddenly it passes that bar.

But seeing that we do have incremental improvements on essentially all evals (and my own experience), even if it takes another decade we should be planning for it now. Even if it does require an entirely fundamental breakthrough like the attention paper, given the amount of researchers working on it, and capital devoted to it, I wouldn't put any money against such a breakthrough arriving before long.

pyrolistical2• 7 months ago

When most of the human population were farmers should we have taxed advances in agriculture which destroyed the everybody’s job?

albumen• 7 months ago

We didn’t tax tractors, but we did tax the expanded economy tractors enabled, and built institutions to manage the transition.

Ex-farmhands had time to move into new jobs created by the Industrial Revolution, and it took decades. People also moved into knowledge work. What happens when AI takes all those jobs in far less time, with no other industries to offer employment?

If AI makes a few people trillionaires while hollowing out the middle class, how do we keep the lights on?

Gravityloss• 7 months ago

There is a scene of wealth transfer agent simulations. With some dynamics you easily end up in a situation where after enough transactions, all of the wealth is concentrated on one single agent. Think about "I am the state" but extended to the whole world. Billionaires trying to affect countries' elections seems child's play compared to that.

IanCal3• 7 months ago

If AI makes a few people trillionaires while hollowing out the middle class, how do we keep the lights on?

Tax the thing you care about? You don't need to care really about the definition of AI or what an AI is or anything like that, you care that some people got trillions.

Tax "making an absolute shitton of money" or "being worth an insane amount". Taxing AI specifically means you're absolutely fucked if Altman turns out to not earn that much but someone who makes a specific connector to data centres is the richest person in the world. Is Nvidia an AI company? What is AI? *Who cares?* The point is to figure out some way as a society of continuing.

hshdhdhj4444• 7 months ago

We didn’t do X before therefore we shouldn’t do X today under very different circumstances is not a good argument.

You’ve already stated what circumstances are different now.

testbjjl• 7 months ago

Tractors replaced a task in specific fields, farming, construction largely. AI seems to have the potential to cover more territory. The potential blast radius is greater.

dystopiandevel• 7 months ago

Agricultural jobs accounted for more than 80% of the preindustrial workforce. Granted you still needed people to maintain the jobs and some roles weren't entirely replaced or replaceable. I wonder how the two compare. I will say that AI has the opportunity to affect many lines of work which makes it scary for many.

erin_lave2• 7 months ago

AI seems to have the potential to cover more territory.

Theoretically, the only two things that any human go to earn money is (a) use muscles or (b) use brains.

I feel like AI plus robots covers all the territory. Maybe not quite yet - maybe we have a few more years, but what job could a human do that couldn't be done by an AI controlling a humanoid robot?

giancarlostoro2• 7 months ago

Pretty sure farmers don't buy them tax free? I'm sure they write some of the cost off, but they still foot the rest of the tax burden.

jasode• 7 months ago

Pretty sure farmers don't buy them tax free? [...], but they still foot the rest of the tax burden.

To clarify, this isn't about the farmer paying a "sales tax" or VAT as % of the price of buying the tractor.

The article is talking about something else: paying additional machine taxes to cover the loss of unemployed crop workers that would have been paying individual income taxes.

9rx5• 7 months ago

Pretty sure farmers don't buy them tax free?

I do. Agriculture products are zero-rated. But obviously it depends on jurisdiction.

Uehreka• 7 months ago

These two waves of automation are fundamentally different and shouldn’t be compared.

We got lucky that when farming was being mechanized, it happened slowly and while manufacturing was still growing and could soak up the labor. When manufacturing was offshored/automated, we got less lucky and a lot of people faced a massive drop in quality of life as they lost their high paying jobs and couldn’t find equivalent ones in the service sector.

Now we’re seeing a potential massive job displacement, the force doing the displacing can likely also do many of the new jobs that may arise, and the change is happening faster than any ever before.

Capitalism doesn’t promise to create new jobs when old ones are automated, we’ve just gotten lucky in the past, and our luck has run out.

__alexs• 7 months ago

We did in a way. Tractors help produce more goods. Those goods incur VAT at the point of sale to consumers.

wccrawford• 7 months ago

They don't "help produce more goods". They "reduce the need for human labor", enabling fewer people to produce as much as before.

That's exactly what AI is doing.

9rx5• 7 months ago

when almost everyone was employed in agriculture

Employment was a product of the industrial revolution. In the age when most everyone worked in agriculture, they owned the farm operation.

We didn't tax the tractor to bail out failing small businesses then, and I strongly suspect there is no will to tax AI to bail out failing small businesses that might succumb to AI today either. The population generally doesn't like small businesses and is more than happy to see them fail.

KaiserPro• 7 months ago

Tax is kinda tangential to all of this, but:

Tractors largely replaced human labour in farming about a hundred years ago

And what happened around that time? yeah it wasn't a period of smooth calmness was it? Periods of massive changes in productivity (ie lots of people going into unemployment) causes huge societal changes.

The thing that staved off revolution in the US was lots of spending, banking regulations, federal reserve, new deal and the like. Those that didn't do that, fell.

So its less about who pays tax, and more about who is going to give money to the unemployed?

charles_f• 7 months ago

If something transformative is just coming in and threatens the economic flows that sustains your social model, it is worth asking the question of how the economic flows should be proactively updated moving forward.

The tractor created the middle class by giving more people access to jobs that paid better and provided more free time. It is yet to be proven who will benefit from the advancement of LLMs, but there is some consensus in the article that the large companies operating these LLMs will be. From there, proposing taxes on that additional profit doesn't seem ridiculous.

dboreham• 7 months ago

Should we have started taxing tractors?

Tractors are taxed in Montana. We have a "business equipment tax" that works roughly like the tax on cars, but applies to assets that don't drive on the public highway such as tractors and other machinery. Republicans have waged a decades long campaign to reduce/abolish it though.

dax3232• 7 months ago

really interesting

yodsanklai• 7 months ago

Are we rediscovering Marx?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat

madbiz• 7 months ago

In German, this concept is called "Maschinensteuer" (machine tax) or "Wertschöpfungsabgabe" (value-added levy). Interestingly, there's no English version of this Wikipedia article: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wertsch%C3%B6pfungsabgabe

ZiiS• 7 months ago

No taxation without representation is fairly fundamental.

qgin• 7 months ago

This is making it more complicated than it needs to be. You can tax things any way that funds collective expenses but doesn’t disincentivize economic activity ”too much”.

Theres nothing special or holy about income tax. If there’s no more income to tax, that burden gets shifted to corporate tax in some way. Whether it’s across the board or something more fussy like “taxing AI” is just implementation detail.

btbuildem• 7 months ago

That's chasing the effect, not the cause. Forget taxing AI. Liquidate billionaires instead -- redistribute anything over $1B. Death penalty for any fancy avoidance schemes (applicable to the individual and everyone standing to inherit the wealth, including any kind of corporate structure).

This unbridled greed has metastasized into a global existential threat, and needs to be aggressively eradicated.

thatjoeoverthr• 7 months ago

“Boo capitalism” on the outside, AI personhood on the inside. Actual agenda: disposable moral vehicles. AI liability is the goal.

A tax on corporate profits is a tax on cost cutting already.

A tax on “AI” is a way to compartmentalize. But you can’t, and you shouldn’t.

First, you won’t be able to formalize which gains are “AI” and which are not. Is it deep learning? If so, a gunshot detector is taxed and a McDonald’s touch screen is not. Is that what you want?

Second, a host of labor savings that don’t look like “robotics” or “AI” are also not covered. If you increase the MTBF on a traffic light, you cut the labor of light replacement. Is this morally different than a McDonald’s kiosk?

What about the traffic light itself? Shouldn’t that be a cop with a whistle?

We can do this all day.

jijijijij2• 7 months ago

I don't think it's overly complicated. We could create a corporate tax which inversely factors human salaries in relation to created value/profits. It's not an AI tax, but rather an automation tax. Since salaries are taxed, it seems sensible to divert those losses for the collective elsewhere. After all, robots are ultimately not consuming any goods or services with personal income. The profit has to come from somewhere. Along the distribution of resources, collective infrastructure and social services need to be maintained and payed by taxes. You could alternatively tax the money spent, but this creates wrong incentives, I think, and the burden would be unfairly distributed (e.g. everybody has to eat about the same amount). As long, as we don't have something like universal income/wealth redistribution, "efficiency" in automation is parasitic for the collective and shouldn't be incentivized by essentially tax cuts. As long as the collective's needs are met, it doesn't matter if humans or machines did the work.

Basically if you got a business which creates a certain amount of value, the collectives' total tax income (considering possible employees' income tax) should be the same, independently of people employed and paid. 500M profit from fully automated web hosting should result effectively in the same collective tax income as 500M profit from a factory employing 10K people.

Note: I am throwing all "taxes" in a bucket. E.g. humans need health insurance, therefore the fully automated business tax needs to reflect these costs too.

carlosjobim6• 7 months ago

I don't think it's overly complicated. We could create a corporate tax which inversely factors human salaries in relation to created value/profits.

That would be extremely complicated. And would of course be corrupted to the core by all kinds of different parties seeking to benefit from it.

RobertoG2• 7 months ago

All this discussions about 'machines paying taxes' and 'basic income' is just a way of avoiding the obvious question, that is: 'who owns the means of production'?

If machines can make all the work, then, who owns the machines is the only relevant question.

Joel_Mckay• 7 months ago

If a task involves zero workmanship, than the opportunity cost is near $0 anyway.

To be clear, LLM is not real "AI", not sustainable, and already losing money with every new user.

An imperfect mirror shows only the irrational what they wish to see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftBiNu0ZNU

I look forward to likely having a cluster of heavily discounted GPUs in a few years. =3

gethly• 7 months ago

I'm not even going to read it because its dumb.

If a company has less employees due to automation, its profits go up due to lower costs. If government tries to extract higher taxes from such company due to automation taking jobs away form people, that company will increase its prices to offset this increase in costs. But companies themselves pay no taxes, they just funnel taxes away from customers - humans. So in the end, less people will work while at the same time they will pay more taxes.

Economics 1.0.1

viralpoetry• 7 months ago

"The gains in technics are never registered automatically in society: they require equally adroid inventions and adaptations in politics; and the careless habit of attributiong to mechanical improvements a direct role as instruments of culture and civilization puts a demand upon the machine to which it cannot respond."

- Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

akabalanza• 7 months ago

AI is not replacing workers. Companies are. Thus what about taxing company profits?

phito• 7 months ago

How do you tax companies once they've become more powerful than the government (which can be equated to a company representing humans), and don't need humans anymore because they've automated labor?

For now we can tax them because they depend on us. Once they don't need us anymore, it's over, they'll let us starve and carry on.

novaRom• 7 months ago

No additional tax is needed, instead just do fork them once they reached certain level. So, basically split each company once it overgrowth certain level of its revenue. This will allow more automation split more equally among more people. Basically, strong AI is a "one-man company" dream. Just do whatever needed to allow equal access to AI by every member of your society, and make founding new businesses quick and easy.

HarHarVeryFunny• 7 months ago

Does automation use generally pay taxes?

Should Amazon pay taxes for using factory robots in lieu of people?

Should fabric manufacturers pays taxes for using automated looms instead of hand weaving ?

Even if lawmakers wanted to tax AI, how would they do it? How do you measure the AI usage level at a company, or the number of workers it has displaced?

sdf4j• 7 months ago

That's what Bill Gates proposed [0].

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-wants-tax-robots-2...

FrozenSynapse• 7 months ago

Tax everything the company produces/profit more and reduce the tax on the human workers.

raincom• 7 months ago

Should AI also pay rent, mortgage, healthcare insurance, auto insurance, etc? Whatever workers make goes to rent/mortgage/insurance. A tiny percentage of workers save for retirement. Now everyone becomes a 'retiree' without monthly allowance.

spankibalt• 7 months ago

In paradise, the unemployed pay taxes for being unemployed to the owners of "AI" systems. :*

cjbgkagh• 7 months ago

Gaines in efficiency is probably the number one thing that can’t be effectively taxed long term. Perhaps it could be possible to tax a specific process but even then the incentive to create loopholes would be immense, since the process is already porous those who can effectively avoid the tax make more money to invest back into making more loopholes. If we can’t stop such corruption when it is subsidizing less efficient industries that waste much of their surplus on their inherent inefficiencies how could we expect to stop it when it’s subsidizing more efficient industries.

Additionally the improvements in technology enables vertical integration at much lower scales and this means there is left surface area to tax, cheap raw goods go in, cheap refined goods come out. This already scales down to such an extent I DIY many personal projects with CNCs, and by leveraging services like Send-Cut-Send and PCBWay I can build all sorts of stuff that I otherwise would have spend 10x more on. Instead of having to earn more money that is taxed in order to purchase it I can build it as a hobby. Increasing the tax on the pipeline on purchased goods would just increase the proportion of projects that are more economical for me to make. My hobby would make money if I sold the items, but since they’re for personal use this does not get taxed.

Something unusual about the AI revolution is that the increase in productivity does not appear to be mirrored by an increase in consumption. More of what people consume is entirely digital, many people spend their lives scrolling TikTok and they do appear to be satiated. Sure there is a data center boom but I think that’s more of a mania and is going to end up over built.

The computer and internet revolutions are still slowly propagating throughout the world, there are still many technological gains to be made here and I think one of the limiters to adoption is the lack of available tech talent in the long tail. AI is different as it requires far less tech talent to use and additionally makes it easier to take advantage of the computer and internet revolutions. Not only can it propagate without the same limiting factors but it facilitates the propagation of the other revolutions at the same time.

francisofascii• 7 months ago

It should pay taxes because it extracts the knowledge of our collective civilization. In the same way land or natural resource extraction should be taxed. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

torginus• 7 months ago

I had a stray thought - if all those 1%ers whose sons and daughters attend elite schools to become high powered barristers and other such elites, find that their kids no longer have career prospects, is it possible that we'll be hearing more about how exploitative the economy is, and how capitalism has failed the people?

kgc• 7 months ago

If all goes as assumed in this thread, there will be more taxes because there will be higher profit margins at the corporate level.

default_• 7 months ago

Does your vacuum-cleaner pay taxes?

kortilla4• 7 months ago

No, just like neither the horse nor the steam engine paid taxes

weddpros• 7 months ago

Unsurprisingly it’s a European article. Europe will tax AI to death like it does with everything it can’t find a way to compete in. And it can’t compete in much…

bombcar2• 7 months ago

GNU and BSD-licensed software code has replaced a measurable amount of codes, as various companies no longer need to duplicate effort - should GNU be taxed? How?

Parae• 7 months ago

Is GNU getting income by replacing human-made work ? GNU and FSF are nonprofit organizations providing free software to people.

It's the kind of organization that could be financed by taxes on AI mega-corp.

vatsachak• 7 months ago

Just tax profits

huevosabio• 7 months ago

The answer is, no, just tax land value.

Henry George, and David Riccardo before him, figured that as productivity and thus wealth increases the value accrues to the land owners, not capital not labor.

This is because Land is the fundamental bottleneck of human activity, the core finite resource. And as everything else gets more productive, the land itself becomes more valuable.

So, yes, tax Land, and redistribute as a dividend to all citizens. After all, no one can be credited for building that Land.

samdoesnothing• 7 months ago

200 years ago that was true, now it's easier than ever to run a business with zero land.

LastTrain• 7 months ago

One of the big questions about AI is whether it will, like typical advances, create more jobs than it destroys. If it doesn’t, our problems are going to be bigger than taxes.

njarboe3• 7 months ago

Many problems with the tax code and all of its complications is due to the fact that people are taxed on revenue and businesses are taxed on profit (revenue -costs). It would be good to remove this mismatch. I would prefer eliminating the income tax (land tax anyone?) but you could take business on revenue (a VAT is sort of like this).

boltzmann_• 7 months ago

This will destroy low margin business (ex Supermarkets?), they will be forced to increase prices. There is a million downstream bad consequences

qudat• 7 months ago

I’d rather figure out how to stop taxing people and place the burden on companies entirely. Make it progressive like income tax but make it based on revenue not profits.

daedrdev• 7 months ago

Revenue has almost no relation to the ability to pay. There are plenty of businesses making 1 or 2% profit, often because they have high pass through, like distributors of all forms, including supermarkets and stores.

thedudeabides5• 7 months ago

Corporate taxes exist

Zigurd4• 7 months ago

This question is weirdly wrapped up in how robots are perceived, and how humanoid robots are propelled by hype about replacing humans. Robots that are actual industrial capital equipment already pay property taxes. Unless of course the state or municipality has been bamboozled into giving up those property taxes for the sake of jobs that robots are eliminating. That's weird.

waffletower• 7 months ago

If I were a hedge fund shorting AI, I would nod and promote the message of this article.

almosthere• 7 months ago

I don't get the fetish of making people (or things) pay taxes more and more.

The government wants us to focus on who should pay more taxes, but I think we owe it to ourselves to spend 600 comments on HOW OUR FUCKING TAXES SHOULD BE SPENT!

Great so now AI will give the government 800 million dollars per year to do what, build non-existent homeless shelters in LA?

oxag3n• 7 months ago

Whether it should or should not pay taxes is irrelevant.

Will it pay taxes? I think you know the answer.

jacobsenscott• 7 months ago

AI can't pay taxes - but there's a fairly short list of names of people who should be paying taxes to offset the costs of AI.

1970-01-01• 7 months ago

About as reasonable as the time a dog was CEO of Twitter.

bdcravens• 7 months ago

We've never taxed robots for the employees they replaced in manufacturing.

vayup• 7 months ago

We don't want a rebellion sparked by 'Taxation without representation'. Do we?

cakealert• 7 months ago

The real question is if AI replaces labor, what will keep democracy in place?

People who advocate for things like UBI don't seem to realize that when voters don't have a share in the productivity of their nation, they become 100% a liability. The reason democracy persists is that the powers that be aren't incentivized to destroy democracy as it would harm them too. In 10 years that will no longer be the case. Arguably, you can already see this today as the future expectations affect the present.

NewUser76312• 7 months ago

No, "AI" is software, and software is a tool, and tools aren't people that should pay taxes.

You wouldn't charge your CNC Machine taxes for the productive labor it produces that could have otherwise been done by a dozen blacksmiths.

By all means have corporate and sales taxes pertaining to the owner of said tools though. Even as a right-leaning individual, it's become pretty clear to me that corporations pay too low in taxes compared to the broad 'middle class'. Corporate tax cuts don't help the common man. An extra few hundred in their pockets each month certainly would though.

vondur• 7 months ago

It'd be hard to tax them now since most of them are bleeding cash. I suppose you can go after Google, they make a ton of cash.

geldedus2• 7 months ago

Should you pay more personal taxes because you do the job of three other people because you use better tools?

_blk• 7 months ago

Food for thought: "If AI replaces workers but doesn't pay taxes, should we also stop paying taxes?"

janalsncm• 7 months ago

It would be great if we stopped talking about “AI” like a sentient monolith. AI is not one thing. It is a set of methods for solving tasks with a computer.

Instead, it should be called “automation”. If we do that, it’s immediately obvious that this article doesn’t make sense. Should automation pay taxes isn’t even coherent. The obvious answer is, those using automation pay taxes, and should continue to. Perhaps at an elevated rate to compensate for the social costs.

spixy• 7 months ago

This is why there should be no income tax. Only corporate taxes and VAT / sales taxes.

CGMthrowaway• 7 months ago

The income tax was never meant to fall on flesh and blood citizens at all.

The original draft was a corporate excise tax. Only after the tariffs came down did the Wall Street/Progressive coalition widen the net to wages so the Federal Reserve’s new war-credit machine could be serviced by the very labor it would soon dilute through inflation.

An alternative to putting a tax on "AI workers" could be to restore the tariff wall that protected wages. I suspect I'll be downvoted for suggesting that though.

pessimizer• 7 months ago

This is a powerfully stupid idea. The only reason to justify taxing income at all is because the government manages the relationship between employer and employee, and protects the employee from abuse - and even that's a bit shaky when it comes to income taxes, because the obligation to the government doesn't really scale up with income. Income taxes are new and weird. Other taxes are a lot easier to justify.

But the worst part is the idea of taxing automation and innovation. You might as well put a tax on intelligence and skill, because if you were dumber and hadn't learned anything, it would take more people to do your job. It's a comically stupid idea that no one is seriously considering.

It's just a distraction from taxing the usual suspects, the wealthy, who are more of a burden to government the more they own, and who are the least taxed they've ever been. Instead of being taxed by governments, they get direct cash grants, regulatory capture, intelligence agents and diplomats with a primary purpose of subverting and suborning foreign governments to their advantage, and perpetual wars to burn off their production.

The Western intellectual class is an annoying mix of morons and propagandists, often in the same person.

edit: US average wealth is 5x US median wealth.

wanderingmind• 7 months ago

The fundamental change we need is to make corporations pay taxes on revenue (top line) and not on profits (bottom line). It's simple, easy to track and in par with income tax of regular people.

stevenalowe• 7 months ago

To what end? The government cannot take care of its unemployed already, why should we believe any kind of “AI tax” would be effective?

ralferoo• 7 months ago

The real problem is that this question starts from what I think is a stupid premise.

If a startup that never had employees uses AI, should be it be taxed differently to a startup that never had employees that doesn't use AI? If so, what is the justification for that? It seems to me it can only be some hypothetical idea that humans might have been able to do some of the work at that company, even if they never have employed people to do that work.

Should a company be taxed more when it reduces employee count for any reason that doesn't involve AI? I'd say not, because otherwise you're forcing companies that are strapped for cash into near or actual bankruptcy instead of being able to downsize.

If a company should be taxed more for reducing employee count while also using AI, but not if they don't, wouldn't you just expect companies to outsource the AI component of the work to other companies?

It seems to me that the crux of this article is trying to find a justification to tax companies working in the AI space more without clearly articulating why.

Yes, the industries of today are going through a seismic shift, similar to the sewing revolution when sewers were losing jobs to machines, or when farm workers tilling the land by hand were replaced by machines, secretaries no longer being required as managers got computers and found it easier just to send an email themselves, etc.

In the near future, just as before, people whose skills are no longer required by industry will have to adapt to survive. But taxing industry just because it's becoming more efficient just has the effect of making that industry less competitive globally.

alexeestec• 7 months ago

The real question isn't whether AI should pay taxes—it's whether we're even asking the right questions about what 'work' means in 20 years. Taxing AI is like taxing electricity after the industrial revolution. We didn't tax the looms, we restructured society around abundance.

The optimistic take nobody wants to hear: if AI genuinely replaces most knowledge work, we're not looking at a tax problem, we're looking at the first real chance to decouple survival from employment. That's either utopia or dystopia depending entirely on whether we're thinking in election cycles or generations.

Will include this link in my next issue of https://hackernewsai.com/

mips_avatar• 7 months ago

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.

ako• 7 months ago

Replacing workers has been going on for many years, just ask mineworkers, factory employees, and many other workers. It seems that here on hackernews we're happy if this happens when it bring down prices and doesn't impact our jobs. But once it starts effecting software engineers it's the end of the world?

I do see and agree with the dangers of AI, but it would have been a bit less selfish if we'd been this concerned when other jobs got replaced by automation.

burnt-resistor• 7 months ago

This is the most hilarious ineffectual and defeatist copium I've read all month. Billionaires don't pay taxes. Getting there would first require billionaires paying their fair share of taxes, which is never going to happen in an extremely corrupt political environment. If the billionaires benefitting from the incessant destruction of workers' income equality were held to account, UBI would be a thing but that's not going to happen either with things the way they are at present. It's unsustainable and must change soon before extreme communist agitation comes to offer "salvation" to systematic mistreatment that won't benefit anyone.

jollyllama• 7 months ago

I dunno, should we incentivize the government to liquidate the workforce?

qarl• 7 months ago

Yes, but they only count as 3/5 a person.

jmward01• 7 months ago

Fundamentally we need safety valves for labor supply that always creates a net advantage for workers, but how? My take has always been that advances in productivity that reduce the need for labor should be given back to the workforce via incentives like:

- sabbaticals/funded retraining opportunities: People leave to train creating a need for labor and at the same time increasing the value of labor. This would also create liquidity in the labor market since people would have opportunity to leave their current field and go to a different one.

- strong encouragement to retire earlier: Fewer people in the workforce and more people spending retirement means more demand for jobs and more demand for goods and services.

- limit the workweek more: Same argument as retirement

All of these have positives and negatives, but unless we start thinking about things like this we will get a world where labor is at a massive disadvantage and all the issues that leads to.

twodave2• 7 months ago

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.

reop2whiskey• 7 months ago

Government replaces workers with regulations, should it also pay taxes?

brett-jackson• 7 months ago

If they are subject to taxation, must they also have representation?

DoctorOetker• 7 months ago

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

If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

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