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

bko 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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?
  - carlosjobim 10mo ago
    > 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... That's a pretty Matrix "human-battery" level attitude to your fellow brothers and sisters. "They need to work to pay taxes, rent, and insurance". Ie, they only exist and are allowed to live to be serfs - or cattle really.
- monegator 10mo ago
  - social security - healthcare - armed forces - road/utility maintenance bacially everything funded by taxes
- hansmayer 10mo ago
  Or...infrastructure, public services and schools go unmaintained? How about the magic technology supposedly allowing for all of this efficency, all the while it imagines a human has six fingers, who will maintain that?
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
threethirtytwo 10mo ago
It’s not about logic. It’s about humanity. We are losing.
- appreciatorBus 10mo ago
  1. No, we are not losing. 2. If it was true that we were losing, then tax revenue would be the least of our worries.
  - threethirtytwo 10mo ago
    1. We are absolutely losing. Wealth inequality has never been higher in human history. How does a single human amass such wealth when his physical and intellectual output doesn’t even match that level of equivalent worth? The first reason is he scrapes it off others, and the second reason is technological automation. AI is just one bump in the road of technological innovation magnifying work output. 2. I never said tax is the end all be all of the situation. It’s one attribute we can use to combat AI take over and wealth inequality in the face of a multitude of solutions that can be executed. It is not consistent with logic as shown by the wheel barrow example and I am saying it doesn’t need to be. Understand?
    - appreciatorBus 10mo ago
      This was an article about AI and income tax policy, but you’re making arguments about inequality.
      - threethirtytwo 10mo ago
        [flagged]
  - FranzFerdiNaN 10mo ago
    I hope you still feel you arent losing when your job is gone and thus your income and woops there goes your home because you cant afford your rent/mortgage anymore.
jayd16 10mo ago
To some degree we already do. Corporations pay taxes. We, as a society, allow corporations to pull resources from the commons because the other side of it is that their existence provides a value through jobs and tax revenue and such. If the equation shifts such that the benefits dry up, but the downsides only increase, why should we allow that? The solution could be as simple as higher business taxes or as wild as universal basic income. It could be something like all AI is forced to be open source, open weight, free at least as far as the knowledge parts. There's certainly no God given right to exclusively benefit from an invention. We allow that for as long as we care to. And there's nothing illogical about changing these decisions as factors change.
- appreciatorBus 10mo ago
  Indeed, there’s nothing illogical about adjusting tax rates and structures as things change. I am deeply sceptical of the idea that 99% of us are suddenly going to be idle any day now, so I think endless think pieces on what we should do when that day arrives are kind of pointless. But it is certainly obvious that if it did happen, we would have to reassess how we do stuff.
- jaccola 10mo ago
  This is utterly backwards and your false statement leads to a completely wrong set of inferences. We don't let corporations do anything because they provide value through jobs and taxes. What company do you know that exists (beyond transiently) solely by paying taxes and employing people? Companies are an extension of the individual, they exist to make money for the individuals that own them so that those individuals can acquire goods and services that they themselves need or desire. How do companies make this money? Holding people at gun point and taking it is generally illegal; instead they resort to providing goods or services to some set of people who are willing to pay for them. To provide these goods or services they need to employ people. The fewer people companies in aggregate can employ, the better for people in aggregate since those people can acquire "things" (food, jewellery, phones,...) for less of their own labour (or equivalent dollars). If the "benefits dry up" as you say, people will stop sending their hard earned money to this company and the company will eventually cease to exist. Your fallacy was assuming the benefits were the jobs and taxes, not the goods and services provided.
rorylawless 10mo ago
I'm not so sure this argument is valid. The invention of the wheel barrow created new jobs in wheel barrow manufacturing and distribution. On the other hand, the promise/threat of AI seems to be the complete displacement of humans in many industries without creating alternative employment for the vast majority.
- jayd16 10mo ago
  Just to expand on this. The wheelbarrow increases the value of labor. It's not a good analogy.
  - appreciatorBus 10mo ago
    It increases the value for that one person who uses the wheelbarrow sure, but it does not raise the value of labour in aggregate. The same would be true of AI tools.
    - jayd16 10mo ago
      Taken to the extreme, you're arguing that tools have only lowered the value of labor in aggregate and that seems obviously false. The value of labor is dependent on the demand of that labor and tools increase demand by increasing what projects can be done.
      - appreciatorBus 10mo ago
        I did not argue the tools lowered the value of labour in aggregate - I merely said that they did not increase it. However, the effect on the individual and the group are different. If you have 10 people carrying boulders across the field, and you introduce a wheelbarrow, and now you have one person carrying the same amount of boulders across the field, the total aggregate value of labour has stayed the same. This particular person can certainly capture more of that aggregate value than they could have before, but the total value has not gone up. It’s also true that now you have lowered the cost of moving boulders across the field, so yes, there could be more demand for whatever it is you’re selling and that could mean that maybe you need two or three workers with wheelbarrows. but I think if you’re going to talk about the value of aggregate labor, you have to control for the amount of demand.
bybuybye 10mo ago
Apples and oranges. Wheelbarrow is obviously limited in the types of tasks it can handle.
- carlosjobim 10mo ago
  What about the wheel then? It's stolen plenty of jobs, not only from people, but from animals too.
kelseydh 10mo ago
Corporations should be taxed on their profits, including profits boosted by the invention of new technology.
- bilekas 10mo ago
  > Corporations should be taxed on their profits Hold on now, how will 'trickle-down' economics work then ? Think of the poor companies trying to provide a living for all those AI. /s
- mirzap 10mo ago
  They already have, significantly, around 25-35% in developed economies. The issue is that people often look at revenue, seeing company X earning $100 billion annually, and assume they should pay $20 billion in taxes. However, most AI companies today are not profitable and spend up to 100% more than their revenue on R&D and product development. I doubt they will turn a profit anytime soon, probably not for at least a decade.
  - vb-8448 10mo ago
    Actually it's much less, big corps are using any possibile schema to avoid paying taxes.
  - atwrk 10mo ago
    Effective corporate tax rates were between 12 and 14% for the US, with some of the biggest corporations bordering 0%.
  - tete 10mo ago
    > They already have, significantly, around 25-35% in developed economies The thing is companies and even self-employed individuals of a certain wealth level know how to "(ab)use" it. From illegal but trivial and hard to detect tax evasion to financing personal lifestyle by having the company pay for certain luxuries (cars, computers, furniture, etc.). If you have the wealth to have a dedicated office that dedicated office can be your man cave if you justify it with having all sorts of amenities for customers. And good luck to whoever checks taxes to find out how exactly things are used/not used. All of that usually means that companies, company owners and high ranking managers get away with not paying taxes for a lot of things that everyone else does simply because they don't have a say within these companies. And all of that is before you go to the tax advisor. I am sorry, but if you do hard honest work the chances of you getting rich are beyond slim. Even worse when you do something that actually benefits society.
wyre 10mo ago
By your logic wheel barrows could potentially replace >90% of all jobs. AI is on track to being able to remove a society-changing amount of jobs, wheel barrows improved worker's efficiency.
- unglaublich 10mo ago
  Industrialization did replace 90% of people's jobs. And the only thing that happened was that people got new jobs to do.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - wyre 10mo ago
    Wheel barrows are not industrialization. hfs
- tete 10mo ago
  A lot of them are bullshit jobs though. We've yet to see "AI" do anything actually beneficial. I don't mean the stuff that was done before the AI hype like categorizing bacteria, etc. Watch the news. One crisis after another, so maybe that freed up work force and the wealth generated by "AI" should be used to tackle at least one of them. Huge amounts of taxes and dedication of that money could be a first step. Alternatively don't raise taxes and use the oh so great AI to tackle these issues. Should be trivial if you have ">90%" of all work freed up.
baq 10mo ago
if the wheelbarrows drive, load and unload themselves, maybe? social unrest must be priced in at this point somewhere
- appreciatorBus 10mo ago
  The folks agitating for “social revolt” are not people at risk of losing their jobs, rather it’s the same people who’ve been agitating for social revolt for decades - people wealthy enough to spend years in university reading critical theory whose financial security was never at risk, whether from wheelbarrows or robots.
iberator 10mo ago
The problem is that AI takes jobs faster than creating new ones. That's unique in human history
- appreciatorBus 10mo ago
  The problem is that thousands of sub-stackers, journalists, and "thought leaders" have realized they can make a living writing a weekly think piece speculating that AI will take jobs. Sadly not unique in human history.

bko 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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?
- carlosjobim 10mo ago
  > 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... That's a pretty Matrix "human-battery" level attitude to your fellow brothers and sisters. "They need to work to pay taxes, rent, and insurance". Ie, they only exist and are allowed to live to be serfs - or cattle really.
monegator 10mo ago
- social security - healthcare - armed forces - road/utility maintenance bacially everything funded by taxes
hansmayer 10mo ago
Or...infrastructure, public services and schools go unmaintained? How about the magic technology supposedly allowing for all of this efficency, all the while it imagines a human has six fingers, who will maintain that?
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

threethirtytwo 10mo ago

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

appreciatorBus 10mo ago
1. No, we are not losing. 2. If it was true that we were losing, then tax revenue would be the least of our worries.
- threethirtytwo 10mo ago
  1. We are absolutely losing. Wealth inequality has never been higher in human history. How does a single human amass such wealth when his physical and intellectual output doesn’t even match that level of equivalent worth? The first reason is he scrapes it off others, and the second reason is technological automation. AI is just one bump in the road of technological innovation magnifying work output. 2. I never said tax is the end all be all of the situation. It’s one attribute we can use to combat AI take over and wealth inequality in the face of a multitude of solutions that can be executed. It is not consistent with logic as shown by the wheel barrow example and I am saying it doesn’t need to be. Understand?
  - appreciatorBus 10mo ago
    This was an article about AI and income tax policy, but you’re making arguments about inequality.
    - threethirtytwo 10mo ago
      [flagged]
- FranzFerdiNaN 10mo ago
  I hope you still feel you arent losing when your job is gone and thus your income and woops there goes your home because you cant afford your rent/mortgage anymore.

jayd16 10mo ago

To some degree we already do. Corporations pay taxes. We, as a society, allow corporations to pull resources from the commons because the other side of it is that their existence provides a value through jobs and tax revenue and such. If the equation shifts such that the benefits dry up, but the downsides only increase, why should we allow that? The solution could be as simple as higher business taxes or as wild as universal basic income. It could be something like all AI is forced to be open source, open weight, free at least as far as the knowledge parts. There's certainly no God given right to exclusively benefit from an invention. We allow that for as long as we care to. And there's nothing illogical about changing these decisions as factors change.

appreciatorBus 10mo ago
Indeed, there’s nothing illogical about adjusting tax rates and structures as things change. I am deeply sceptical of the idea that 99% of us are suddenly going to be idle any day now, so I think endless think pieces on what we should do when that day arrives are kind of pointless. But it is certainly obvious that if it did happen, we would have to reassess how we do stuff.
jaccola 10mo ago
This is utterly backwards and your false statement leads to a completely wrong set of inferences. We don't let corporations do anything because they provide value through jobs and taxes. What company do you know that exists (beyond transiently) solely by paying taxes and employing people? Companies are an extension of the individual, they exist to make money for the individuals that own them so that those individuals can acquire goods and services that they themselves need or desire. How do companies make this money? Holding people at gun point and taking it is generally illegal; instead they resort to providing goods or services to some set of people who are willing to pay for them. To provide these goods or services they need to employ people. The fewer people companies in aggregate can employ, the better for people in aggregate since those people can acquire "things" (food, jewellery, phones,...) for less of their own labour (or equivalent dollars). If the "benefits dry up" as you say, people will stop sending their hard earned money to this company and the company will eventually cease to exist. Your fallacy was assuming the benefits were the jobs and taxes, not the goods and services provided.

rorylawless 10mo ago

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

jayd16 10mo ago
Just to expand on this. The wheelbarrow increases the value of labor. It's not a good analogy.
- appreciatorBus 10mo ago
  It increases the value for that one person who uses the wheelbarrow sure, but it does not raise the value of labour in aggregate. The same would be true of AI tools.
  - jayd16 10mo ago
    Taken to the extreme, you're arguing that tools have only lowered the value of labor in aggregate and that seems obviously false. The value of labor is dependent on the demand of that labor and tools increase demand by increasing what projects can be done.
    - appreciatorBus 10mo ago
      I did not argue the tools lowered the value of labour in aggregate - I merely said that they did not increase it. However, the effect on the individual and the group are different. If you have 10 people carrying boulders across the field, and you introduce a wheelbarrow, and now you have one person carrying the same amount of boulders across the field, the total aggregate value of labour has stayed the same. This particular person can certainly capture more of that aggregate value than they could have before, but the total value has not gone up. It’s also true that now you have lowered the cost of moving boulders across the field, so yes, there could be more demand for whatever it is you’re selling and that could mean that maybe you need two or three workers with wheelbarrows. but I think if you’re going to talk about the value of aggregate labor, you have to control for the amount of demand.

bybuybye 10mo ago

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

carlosjobim 10mo ago
What about the wheel then? It's stolen plenty of jobs, not only from people, but from animals too.

kelseydh 10mo ago

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

bilekas 10mo ago
> Corporations should be taxed on their profits Hold on now, how will 'trickle-down' economics work then ? Think of the poor companies trying to provide a living for all those AI. /s
mirzap 10mo ago
They already have, significantly, around 25-35% in developed economies. The issue is that people often look at revenue, seeing company X earning $100 billion annually, and assume they should pay $20 billion in taxes. However, most AI companies today are not profitable and spend up to 100% more than their revenue on R&D and product development. I doubt they will turn a profit anytime soon, probably not for at least a decade.
- vb-8448 10mo ago
  Actually it's much less, big corps are using any possibile schema to avoid paying taxes.
- atwrk 10mo ago
  Effective corporate tax rates were between 12 and 14% for the US, with some of the biggest corporations bordering 0%.
- tete 10mo ago
  > They already have, significantly, around 25-35% in developed economies The thing is companies and even self-employed individuals of a certain wealth level know how to "(ab)use" it. From illegal but trivial and hard to detect tax evasion to financing personal lifestyle by having the company pay for certain luxuries (cars, computers, furniture, etc.). If you have the wealth to have a dedicated office that dedicated office can be your man cave if you justify it with having all sorts of amenities for customers. And good luck to whoever checks taxes to find out how exactly things are used/not used. All of that usually means that companies, company owners and high ranking managers get away with not paying taxes for a lot of things that everyone else does simply because they don't have a say within these companies. And all of that is before you go to the tax advisor. I am sorry, but if you do hard honest work the chances of you getting rich are beyond slim. Even worse when you do something that actually benefits society.

wyre 10mo ago

By your logic wheel barrows could potentially replace >90% of all jobs. AI is on track to being able to remove a society-changing amount of jobs, wheel barrows improved worker's efficiency.

unglaublich 10mo ago
Industrialization did replace 90% of people's jobs. And the only thing that happened was that people got new jobs to do.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- wyre 10mo ago
  Wheel barrows are not industrialization. hfs
tete 10mo ago
A lot of them are bullshit jobs though. We've yet to see "AI" do anything actually beneficial. I don't mean the stuff that was done before the AI hype like categorizing bacteria, etc. Watch the news. One crisis after another, so maybe that freed up work force and the wealth generated by "AI" should be used to tackle at least one of them. Huge amounts of taxes and dedication of that money could be a first step. Alternatively don't raise taxes and use the oh so great AI to tackle these issues. Should be trivial if you have ">90%" of all work freed up.

baq 10mo ago

if the wheelbarrows drive, load and unload themselves, maybe? social unrest must be priced in at this point somewhere

appreciatorBus 10mo ago
The folks agitating for “social revolt” are not people at risk of losing their jobs, rather it’s the same people who’ve been agitating for social revolt for decades - people wealthy enough to spend years in university reading critical theory whose financial security was never at risk, whether from wheelbarrows or robots.

iberator 10mo ago

The problem is that AI takes jobs faster than creating new ones. That's unique in human history

appreciatorBus 10mo ago
The problem is that thousands of sub-stackers, journalists, and "thought leaders" have realized they can make a living writing a weekly think piece speculating that AI will take jobs. Sadly not unique in human history.