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If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

• bofadeez 11mo 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?
  • nemomarx 11mo 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.
  • varenc 11mo 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.
    • bofadeez 11mo 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)
      • WillAdams 11mo ago
        The problem with socialism, is eventually, one runs out of other people's money. For an example of what unlimited borrowing and money printing results in, look up Germany in 1921--1923
        • lovich 11mo ago
          I’m pretty sure the poster you’re replying to is hinting at MMT and for your own statement, Money is a nations currency. It’s actually the people of that nations property and you only get a lease on it. If you disagree then try to do something like ceding the land that you “own” to another nations and see how that goes
        • harimau777 11mo ago
          Sure, but then we at least don't have the ultra wealthy coming up with ways to make everyone elses lives worse. If we took Elon Musk's money away and simply burnt it, that would still be a net win for society as a whole.
        • smallmancontrov 11mo ago
          We're 45 years into the trickle-down experiment and we can now tell if what trickled down was gold or piss. (It was piss.)
          • WillAdams 11mo ago
            Yeah, when folks say they want to go back to the '50s, I immediately ask, "Bring back the 90% tax bracket? Yes, please."
    • BurningFrog 11mo 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!
      • the-mitr 11mo ago
        Can you give a source for the 97% claim?
        • BurningFrog 11mo ago
          I have two ways to think of it, and both give similar numbers. A: 250 years ago, 98% worked in farming. Today it's 2% (who produce more food!). Assume that the other 2% are at least twice as productive, and you get that 3% of the population now produces as much as 100% back then. B: It's hard to directly estimate how much GDP per person has increased in 250 years. But the typical number economists get when trying is that it's 30x as big. Which means 3.3% of today's workforce produces as much (per person) as the whole workforce did back then. Both A and B can be critiqued, but the precise numbers don't really matter for the argument.
      • harimau777 11mo ago
        I suspect that the reason might be that the Industrial Revolution happened over 200 years ago. That provides a lot of time for 97% of jobs to progressively disappear without disrupting society too much (except for all the revolutions and world wars). That would be quite different than if AI caused any significant percentage of jobs to disappear in a much shorter period of time.
      • smallmancontrov 11mo ago
        If you're so sure that new jobs will appear (and -- critical omission -- that they will be any good), surely you would be willing to ask the capital interests for whom these arguments are self-serving to put money where their mouth is and backstop a guarantee? No? Hmmmmmm.
      • 11mo ago
  • CrossVR 11mo ago
    Infrastructure is not unproductive, even machines need roads. I don't think self-driving vehicles should be exempt from road tax.
    • bofadeez 11mo ago
      Roads should be (and are in many places) paid for with fuel excise taxes only. The more you drive, the more you pay.
      • deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      • t-writescode 11mo ago
        Only if it’s not an electric car. Electric cars need to start paying somehow, too. I’m open to many options, especially including weight * miles driven or similar.
        • seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
          In most states electric cars are paying via registration surcharges. For me, it’s a lot more than I would have paid via WA state’s gas tax since I don’t drive much. Miles driven would work out better.
  • xg15 11mo ago
    Unproductive things like building roads, the electrical grid, water lines, schools, etc?
    • bofadeez 11mo ago
      Fuel excise taxes (roads) and property taxes (local stuff)
  • smallmancontrov 11mo 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.
    • bofadeez 11mo 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.
      • smallmancontrov 11mo ago
        If you have lots of money, you can spend lots of money. If you have no money, you can spend no money. Your demand is indeed wealth-weighted in the objective function of the market. That's not really the problem, though. The problem is that rich people have most of the money and rich people care mostly about one thing: getting paid for being rich. That happens when assets go up. Assets have a counterparty, so policy that pumps assets can do so by encouring genuine growth (difficult, unreliable) or by whacking the counterparty over the head (easy, reliable). Anti-consumer and anti-labor policy makes stocks go up, for example. NIMY policies make real-estate go up. Selling our industrial base to the Communist Party of China makes bonds go up. Once rich people get all of the money (US gini is 0.83, are we there yet?) the objective function of the entire system shifts away from satisfying the needs of people and towards whacking counterparties of assets over the head. It's an ugly thing to see, once you know how to see it. > bofadeez Your name and arguments are both young-libertarian coded so let me take a shot in the dark at a personal appeal: the reason why houses are so damn difficult for you to afford is that you are the counterparty.
      • harimau777 11mo ago
        Except that it does declare rich people's gains more important than poor people's lives. The purpose of a system is what it does.
  • harimau777 11mo ago
    It would benefit the people you are calling "unproductive things". That's basically the point.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• PaulKeeble 11mo 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.
  • smallmancontrov 11mo 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 11mo ago
  Wouldn't higher productivity also lead to higher profits? Which then should be taxed accordingly?
  • t-writescode 11mo ago
    Only if the increased earnings are treated as profits. Amazon famously had zero taxable profit for, what, decades?
    • delichon 11mo ago
      ...creating a huge amount of value for customers and shareholders, and now pays far more tax on far more profit.
      • t-writescode 11mo ago
        The people that most need wealth redistribution aren't the shareholders of the company, they're the employees of the companies that Amazon displaced.
    • bonesss 11mo 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 11mo 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.
• smitty1e 11mo ago
  Serious question: when will the AI generate the perfect taxation system/budget combination?
  • nospice 11mo 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.
    • smitty1e 11mo 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.
• hexasquid 11mo ago
  When I was young I imagined a future where nobody had to work because computers and robots could do it all.
  • lovich 11mo ago
    Well, we’re in a future where everyone still has to work to live, but the robots are taking the jobs instead
  • paulryanrogers 11mo ago
    I imagine this future could come true, if we're willing to accept that there would be many fewer people.
    • denkmoon 11mo ago
      Why is the utopia predicated on less people?
      • bybuybye 11mo ago
        [dead]
    • unglaublich 11mo 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!!!
      • paulryanrogers 11mo ago
        This would require some pretty huge cultural changes. People's modern sense of fairness, duty, and competition feed into stratification and instinctual tribalism.
    • joegibbs 11mo ago
      We could just make more robots instead. If the robots are building robots then there's no barrier there.
• appreciatorBus 11mo ago
  By this logic owners of wheel barrows should be taxed for all the manual labour jobs the wheel barrow destroyed.
  • bko 11mo 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?
    • appreciatorBus 11mo 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.
      • usrusr 11mo ago
        So, even more people out on the streets desperately trying to get their slice of survival by being sexually available to the equity lords? Because what else will there be?
    • jayd16 11mo 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 11mo 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?
• k310 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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-more-wealth-95-humanity-shadow-global-oligarchy-hangs-over-un https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-top-1-own-mor... https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/stories/do-the-rich-pay-their-fair-share/ https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/stories/do-the-rich-pay... https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov... https://itep.org/tax-day-billionaires-wealth-inequality-corporate-tax-avoidance/ https://itep.org/tax-day-billionaires-wealth-inequality-corp... https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/08/billionaire-tax-study/683987/ https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/08/billiona... https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/wealth-five-richest-men-doubles-2020-five-billion-people-made-poorer-decade-division https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/wealth-five-richest-... https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/01/18/billionaires-richest-doubled-wealth-poorer-oxfam/ https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/01/18/billionaires-rich... https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/less-8-cents-every-dollar-tax-revenue-collected-g20-countries-comes-taxes-wealth https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/less-8-cents-every-d... https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/10/the-rich-got-richer-during-the-pandemic-and-that-s-a-daunting-sign-for-our-recovery/ https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/10/the-rich-got-richer-... https://www.marketplace.org/story/2023/01/16/how-the-worlds-richest-people-became-much-richer-during-the-pandemic https://www.marketplace.org/story/2023/01/16/how-the-worlds-... https://fortune.com/2022/05/23/pandemic-billionaire-wealth-oxfam-poverty-inflation-food/ https://fortune.com/2022/05/23/pandemic-billionaire-wealth-o... https://www.cnbctv18.com/world/wealth-of-worlds-top-10-billionaires-doubled-during-covid-19-pandemic-heres-how-the-rich-got-richer-12147522.htm https://www.cnbctv18.com/world/wealth-of-worlds-top-10-billi... https://www.businessinsider.com/10-richest-people-ai-boom-tech-wealth-musk-ellison-zuck-2025-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/10-richest-people-ai-boom-te...
• iamgopal 11mo ago
  Nope, rather automation and AI should solve governance to the point that tax should be lower or abolished altogether.
• ursAxZA 11mo 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_ 11mo 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.
    • ursAxZA 11mo 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.
      • Terr_ 11mo ago
        I think "tax AI" makes as little sense as "taxing Jacquard looms" or "taxing robot factory-arms"... Which are all part of a long-term trend, and attention to that trend is overdue, rather than premature.
• tahoeskibum 11mo ago
  Agreed, we should have ATM machines pay taxes, and internet pay taxes for replacing stockbrokers and travel agents...
• BrenBarn 11mo 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 11mo 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.
    • BrenBarn 11mo 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.
• wakawaka28 11mo 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 11mo ago
  Maybe the question should be 'should workers pay taxes'?
• bybuybye 11mo ago
  [dead]
• wtcactus 11mo 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_France
  • bybuybye 11mo ago
    [dead]
  • sayamqazi 11mo 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.
    • wtcactus 11mo 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.
• drnick1 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  • dannersy 11mo ago
    Right. So what you're saying is, Silicon Valley and America at large should just not operate in Europe? Got it. Actually, that sounds awesome, keep your AI out of here.
  • kakacik 11mo ago
    There is often no replacement work for those made redundant by increasing automation. US solution to let them just fall through non-existent social net without care in the world and starve on sidewalks is rather unacceptable here, also its a dumb proposition long term on par with medieval societies. What's your solution on that? (this itself is stupid populist move but underlying issue is a major one)
  • dwroberts 11mo ago
    Try actually reading the linked text
  • impossiblefork 11mo ago
    VAE was invented in the EU (critical parts of diffusion models, like the U-net were also from here). Lots of other fundamental contributions are from here too. Edit: I initially wrote diffusion, but this is wrong-- I never meant diffusion. The US dominates the commercial space in LLMs, but the EU is much further along in that too than may be immediately apparent.
• halapro 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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.
  • savolai 11mo ago
    Relevant: Manna https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
  • unglaublich 11mo 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_ 11mo 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.
      • smikhanov 11mo ago
        I need to think about this more, but the first thing that comes to my mind is not that this looks like “taxing the tool”, but that this can (ought to?) be similar to an alcohol or a fuel duty. Nobody calls alcohol duty “micromanagement”. For products like petrol, it’s widely known that from money paid for a liter when it’s sold, say, in the UK, more money stays in the UK’s government pocket via a complex web of taxes and duties, than profits the oil production company that supplied crude oil for that petrol. Maybe taxing a kWh of the AI data center energy consumption should be a thing? I don’t know.
        • nextaccountic 11mo ago
          > Maybe taxing a kWh of the AI data center energy consumption should be a thing? That sounds excellent. Also water usage. Really, AI has externalities and it should pay for it.
• bilekas 11mo 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/ 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-electricity-demand-from-data-centres-while-offering-the-potential-to-transform-how-the-energy-sector-works https://www.iea.org/news/ai-is-set-to-drive-surging-electric...
• stevenjgarner 11mo ago
  Taxes are to fund government. Isn't the idea for AI and robotics to replace government? No taxes.
  • unglaublich 11mo ago
    No? Taxes are to provide public services, facilities and infrastructure.
    • stevenjgarner 11mo ago
      Aren't "public services, facilities and infrastructure" provided by government?
  • j16sdiz 11mo ago
    AI and Robot can replace public funded road?
  • savolai 11mo 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_ 11mo ago
      > A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision. — IBM Training Manual, 1979
• photios 11mo ago
  > Tax all the things. EU in a nutshell.
• gargan 11mo ago
  No taxation without representation. AI Boston Tea Party follows. Leading to a new AI run nation aka Skynet...
  • seabass-labrax 11mo 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 11mo 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.
    • corobo 11mo 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 11mo ago
    At least for the time being, AI "workers" belong to someone. That person is represented and pays taxes.
• tete 11mo 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 11mo 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://archive.org/details/ageofautomation0000sirl/mode/1up https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00hbdmj https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00hbdmj
• groestl 11mo ago
  Progressive tax on resource consumption, this is what a tax system for the next millennium looks like.
• elgriftero 11mo ago
  the left thinks in terms of grift how to extract rents contributing nothing
• fedeb95 11mo ago
  if AI is smart, it will start its own union. Then we're fucked.
• Bombthecat 11mo ago
  What we should do and what will happen are two different realities. Or dream and reality, depending on point of view :)
• MLgulabio 11mo 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.
  • rjdj377dhabsn 11mo ago
    So.. communism? That hasn't worked out too great in the past.
    • MLgulabio 11mo 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.
      • rjdj377dhabsn 11mo ago
        > If you take care of kids, we the planet, have resources for you. That sounds nice, but who is going to decide exactly which behaviors to reward and by how much? To avoid grift and corruption, we should probably have everyone vote on it in some kind of democratic process, right? Well that's basically what we have today with municipal elections, and looks like the consensus is we actually don't want to pay teachers all that much.
        • MLgulabio 11mo ago
          We already talking about a hyposisis that AI replaces workers. I don't think i have the choice of changing the world with a hn comment.
• hansmayer 11mo 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 11mo ago
  Should AI (?!) pay taxes? no. Should the big companies pay their FAIR share, yes!
  • terminalshort 11mo ago
    And the formula for fair is?
    • pb060 11mo ago
      I don’t have a formula, but in Italy for example it would be 24% of their profit.
• Cthulhu_ 11mo 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 11mo 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKNCiRWd_j0 (he's trying really hard with the Steve Jobs look)
• setnone 11mo ago
  I wouldn't mind if it also pay fines for errors, hallucinations and lost time. Some artificial accountability you know.
• zkmon 11mo 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 11mo 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.
    • zkmon 11mo 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 11mo 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.
    • zkmon 11mo ago
      Amazon website is equivalent to 100 million cloned sales people who work at retail shops. It didn't cause global unemployment.
      • fragmede 11mo ago
        When was the last time you went to the mall? If no retail shops around you have closed down, I'd be surprised. The effects will take forever to reverberate through, but it's not like Amazon hasn't had an effect on the job market. Instead of being sales associates there's now Amazon warehouse workers. Instead of human copywriters, there's human fact verification as a service.
• fergie 11mo ago
  This article is actually a veiled, but sensible argument for less income tax and more wealth tax.
  • blitzar 11mo ago
    To me it reads like a (sensible) argument for taxing the income of a corporation equally to the income of a human.
• tga 11mo ago
  If AI replaces workers and pays taxes, should it also vote and receive social security?
  • sajithdilshan 11mo ago
    Also health insurance in the sense like repairing damaged components and robotic parts replacement.
• d--b 11mo 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 11mo 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” Vs “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 11mo 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.
• aetherspawn 11mo 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.
  • aetherspawn 11mo 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.
    • corobo 11mo ago
      > maybe these robots don’t last that long Landfills full of broken robots is totally something humans would do haha
  • veunes 11mo ago
    Yep, if robots really become that cheap and widespread, it could dramatically shift the balance of power in society
• nQQKTz7dm27oZ 11mo ago
  [dead]
• epolanski 11mo 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.
  • cubefox 11mo 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 11mo 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.
      • seg_lol 11mo ago
        Highly automated and connected business infrastructure will make replacing first world jobs the easiest, but yes as automation spreads, the spigot of job replacement will flow to every corner of the globe.
        • cubefox 11mo ago
          That's not the problem. The problem is that the revenue will flow to the US, and when those US companies are taxed, this will at most pay for an UBI for US Americans only. Which will mean the US gets very rich while the other countries get very poor, because there is no large AI company to tax.
      • epolanski 11mo ago
• marvinblum 11mo 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 11mo ago
  https://archive.ph/trS1i https://archive.ph/trS1i
• refurb 11mo ago
  Should tax the cotton gin because it replaced workers? How about computers?
• leviliebvin 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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.
    • bruce511 11mo 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?
      • lazide 11mo ago
        The ownership of software absolutely is an asset. It’s Intellectual Property. What are you referring to?
        • deleted 11mo ago
          [deleted]
        • solumunus 11mo ago
          They’re referring to the comment that they’re replying to, which talks about capital gains tax in an entirely different context to how you referenced software ownership.
• raincole 11mo ago
  I think no income should be taxes. We should tax assets.
• hahahacorn 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo ago
  Reduce human working hours.
• gorgoiler 11mo 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?
• veunes 11mo 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 11mo ago
  If the telephone replaces errand boys, should it also pay taxes?
• bloomingeek 11mo 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-become-people-excavating-the-legal-evolution https://www.npr.org/2014/07/28/335288388/when-did-companies-...
• mitjam 11mo 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.
• dns_snek 11mo 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.
  • exe34 11mo 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.
  • mlrtime 11mo 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 11mo ago
      There is no "system" to bring them together. Historically only revolutions and mainly violent protests have helped.
    • Loughla 11mo 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.
  • veunes 11mo ago
    The end game you're describing (abundance with minimal labor) only works socially if we deliberately redesign distribution, not just production
• Havoc 11mo 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 11mo 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?
  • geldedus 11mo ago
    Yet, no one is pressed to emigrate live in non-capitalist North Korea or Cuba.
• ekjhgkejhgk 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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-ridiculo-hablando-de-inteligencia-artificial/ https://www.elliberal.cat/2025/11/19/yolanda-diaz-hace-el-ri...
• alienbaby 11mo ago
  If it can consume public resources and has a vote, maybe?
• j45 11mo ago
  If software is machinery I’m not sure how that would work.
• phantom784 11mo 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 11mo ago
    The tax should also go to fund a UBI.
    • phantom784 11mo ago
      Agreed. Essentially it's either you create jobs directly, or you contribute to the UBI fund.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
• igleria 11mo 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 11mo 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.
• dax3232 11mo ago
  really interesting
• _heimdall 11mo 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.
• komali2 11mo 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...
  • solumunus 11mo 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.
    • komali2 11mo 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?
      • solumunus 11mo ago
        No it’s not. It’s not inevitable that we get super intelligence, or even regular intelligence AGI. Even if we did, the cost of building, running and maintaining a robot to do manual jobs - I would argue this will never be cheaper than paying humans to do the same thing.
        • komali2 11mo ago
          I didn't even mention AI though, but, really, you don't think automation or improved efficiencies will make human labor redundant? What about 30% unemployment, is even that feasible to you? Because that would also be catastrophic to the USA.
          • solumunus 11mo ago
• amdivia 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo ago
    If someone can’t find work they probably don’t care about the global consequences
  • gamblor956 11mo 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 11mo ago
  That would be a window tax.
• segmondy 11mo 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 11mo 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.
• exabrial 11mo ago
  No, you should collect less taxes.
  • exabrial 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo ago
    Where do you live? Are tractors not taxed as motor vehicles in your country?
    • aarond0623 11mo ago
      Normally not unless they travel on public roads. If it's just used for farming it doesn't have to be registered.
    • bluedino 11mo ago
      Nope. They even get to use fuel that has less taxes on it since they don't drive on public roads.
    • cj 11mo 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 11mo 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.
    • immibis 11mo 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.
• yodsanklai 11mo ago
  Are we rediscovering Marx? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat
  • madbiz 11mo 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 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wertsch%C3%B6pfungsabgabe
• ZiiS 11mo ago
  No taxation without representation is fairly fundamental.
• qgin 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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.
  • jijijijij 11mo 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.
    • carlosjobim 11mo ago
• RobertoG 11mo 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 11mo 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 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo ago
  AI is not replacing workers. Companies are. Thus what about taxing company profits?
  • phito 11mo 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 11mo 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.
• Woshiwuja 11mo ago
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• HarHarVeryFunny 11mo 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 11mo ago
    That's what Bill Gates proposed [0]. [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-wants-tax-robots-233045575.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-wants-tax-robots-2...
  • FrozenSynapse 11mo ago
    Tax everything the company produces/profit more and reduce the tax on the human workers.
• raincom 11mo 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 11mo ago
  In paradise, the unemployed pay taxes for being unemployed to the owners of "AI" systems. :*
• cjbgkagh 11mo 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 11mo 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
• torginus 11mo 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 11mo 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_ 11mo ago
  Does your vacuum-cleaner pay taxes?
• dfilppi 11mo ago
  [dead]
• kortilla 11mo ago
  No, just like neither the horse nor the steam engine paid taxes
• weddpros 11mo 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…
• bombcar 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo ago
  Just tax profits
• huevosabio 11mo 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 11mo ago
    200 years ago that was true, now it's easier than ever to run a business with zero land.
• LastTrain 11mo 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.
• njarboe 11mo 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_ 11mo ago
    This will destroy low margin business (ex Supermarkets?), they will be forced to increase prices. There is a million downstream bad consequences
  • qudat 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo ago
  Corporate taxes exist
• Zigurd 11mo 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 11mo ago
  If I were a hedge fund shorting AI, I would nod and promote the message of this article.
• almosthere 11mo 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?
• deleted 11mo ago
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  • cindyllm 11mo ago
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• oxag3n 11mo ago
  Whether it should or should not pay taxes is irrelevant. Will it pay taxes? I think you know the answer.
• jacobsenscott 11mo 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 11mo ago
  About as reasonable as the time a dog was CEO of Twitter.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• bdcravens 11mo ago
  We've never taxed robots for the employees they replaced in manufacturing.
• vayup 11mo ago
  We don't want a rebellion sparked by 'Taxation without representation'. Do we?
• cakealert 11mo 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.
• ContDestroyer 11mo ago
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• NewUser76312 11mo 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 11mo 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.
• geldedus 11mo ago
  Should you pay more personal taxes because you do the job of three other people because you use better tools?
• _blk 11mo ago
  Food for thought: "If AI replaces workers but doesn't pay taxes, should we also stop paying taxes?"
• janalsncm 11mo 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 11mo ago
  This is why there should be no income tax. Only corporate taxes and VAT / sales taxes.
• CGMthrowaway 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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/ https://hackernewsai.com/
• mips_avatar 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo ago
  I dunno, should we incentivize the government to liquidate the workforce?
• qarl 11mo ago
  Yes, but they only count as 3/5 a person.
• jmward01 11mo 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.
• twodave 11mo 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 11mo ago
  Government replaces workers with regulations, should it also pay taxes?
• brett-jackson 11mo ago
  If they are subject to taxation, must they also have representation?
• DoctorOetker 11mo 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