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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 sugge

• savolai 10mo ago
  Relevant: Manna https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
• unglaublich 10mo 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_ 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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.
        • nairboon 10mo ago
          That would be a highly bureaucratic solution with significant overheads. Would everyone pay extra tax per kWh or just AI computers? Tax it on the producer or consumer side? How would you verify that a particular data center is "bad computation" and needs a different tax rate on its energy usage. Should an AI data center from pharmaceuticals or biotech startup be taxed extra per kWh, even if the AI is purely used for medical research?
          • nextaccountic 10mo ago
            Just big AI datacenters. If this encourages people to run local AI, all the better. > Should an AI data center from pharmaceuticals or biotech startup be taxed extra per kWh, even if the AI is purely used for medical research? That's not a gotcha.. those are all policy choices. My personal preference is, yes, of course - medical research today is taxed just fine. If there's lobbying to specifically grant tax benefits to medical research, I can see an exception being carved.
            • delaminator 10mo ago
              You think multiple localised heat centres are more efficient than centralised managed heat centres. Why don't we all just have a coal-fired power station in our back garden?
      • blitzar 10mo ago
        Alcohol duty, levies on cigarettes, gambling, sugar taxes etc are considered "sin taxes" and are certainly micromanagement. “taxing the tool” makes me think of transaction taxes, like a tobin tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobin_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobin_tax
    • mcny 10mo ago
      I think the simplest explanation is also the best one. Like you said, it is very difficult to tax wealth. I think we have no option other than taxing loans and other money movements like that in sufficiently large scale as ordinary income. If I get a loan for USD 200k for a house once a year, I think it isn't income but if ElMo gets loans worth USD 20M a year, every year, he should pay income tax on all of that as if it was ordinary income. How he pays it? I don't care. Sell some assets. Oh and that sale is also taxable.
      • snovv_crash 10mo ago
        Tax physical assets. Someone has to pay otherwise it gets confiscated by the government. Then exact ownership doesn't matter.
        • Terr_ 10mo ago
          How do you determine the "value" or an original painting which the current holder acquired 40 years ago in for $X francs?
          • snovv_crash 10mo ago
            By offering to buy it.
    • graemep 10mo ago
      > Taxing wealth is much harder on a practical and algorithmic level than taxing income. Depends on the tax. It is a lot easier to move move profits to a low tax jurisdiction than it is to move land or machinery. > 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. I definitely agree with that. There are all sorts of problems. Do you tax this notional "income" where the work is done or where the AI runs or where the company that owns it is incorporated?
    • nairboon 10mo ago
      > Taxing wealth is much harder on a practical and algorithmic level than taxing income. I find this argument somewhat unconvincing. Where is most of the wealth? In hard assets, such as real estate and financial assets, such as stocks and bonds. The former are very difficult to hide, for obvious reasons. As for the latter, the ownership of every single share is recorded in large databases (e.g. DTCC, Clearstream and Euroclear). In that sense, the "physical location" of most of the wealth is well known, so in theory it should really not be difficult to tax it.
      • darkwater 10mo ago
        But financial assets do not need physical space, so they can be tied to smaller countries which will be very happy to tax them at a lower rate so they can "steal them" from the original country where they were generated.
        • gunalx 10mo ago
          You can still tax based on the persons residence or citizenship. In the end someone can be attributed to wealth, and if they want to stay where they are physically, they should also tax like it.
        • dns_snek 10mo ago
          You can take your financial assets with you but they're ultimately worthless, they're just a construct that represents something which has real value, like shares of a company: its real estate, inventory, employees, institutional knowledge, and future productive output have real value, your piece of paper doesn't. Distribution of wealth is about the distribution of real resources, especially control over human labor. And that underlying thing can always be taxed, optimized, or even repurposed to better serve the needs of society.
      • TheOtherHobbes 10mo ago
        Financial assets are extremely easy to hide. Set up an international chain of shell companies, foundations, and trusts, install a fake beneficial owner or trustee or two at various points, carve out deductibles for IP and "services", and the ownership becomes completely opaque. And that's just the legal version. I know someone who used to work as a business lawyer. She spent years trying to track down the true owners in various cases. At the very least it's an expensive business. And sometimes it just couldn't be done. Of course governments can cut the knot with physical assets, walk into a building with troops and/or police, and say "This is ours now." Or they can order banks to hand over the money in accounts. But before they can do that, there has to be some certainty about the owner. And even getting part way there can take a while and cost a lot.
    • dgb23 10mo ago
      Switzerland taxes wealth instead of capital gains (except for professional investors). In some ways taxing wealth is quite simple, because wealth is already meticulously recorded via contracts and owners go out of their way to estimate the magnitude of their wealth for example to borrow money or for other financial and economic obligations. Another approach would be to tax capital gains at the same rate as income and introduce additional top brackets. I have a hard time to find a good faith reason for capital gains to be taxed less than labor.
      • lingrush4 10mo ago
        Capital gains are risky to generate. Many investments completely fail and when that happens, investors get very little tax relief. If you increase capital gains tax, the more risky ideas will no longer be viable investment vehicles even though some of them would have been successful. Across the entire economy, the net effect will be less innovation, stagnation, and loss of power relative to foreign countries. Tax rates are carefully tuned to maximize tax revenue without unduly disincentivizing production. To change them purely based on vibes would be catastrophically stupid. Please don't vote.
        • Orygin 10mo ago
          > Many investments completely fail and when that happens, investors get very little tax relief I don't really believe it. Investment is always incentivized by tax breaks and other political gifts. But once things turn bad it's the citizen's turn to pay for it. Fire all staff? We pay for unemployment. Pollute the soil? We pay for cleanup. Empty the water table? Guess who's gonna depend on the state for clean water... > To change them purely based on vibes would be catastrophically stupid. Please tell that to every neo liberal in my country. Reducing taxes on the rich seems to be their passtime, while every time some kind of capital gain is mentioned, everyone and their dogs become experts in economics and can tell you it's folly. > Please don't vote. Please don't look down on others.
        • dgb23 10mo ago
          > Capital gains are risky to generate. Many investments completely fail and when that happens, investors get very little tax relief. You seem to conflate and misunderstand a few things here. For one, capital gains are paid out from profits, so they leave the company's budget and are not part of investment. Secondly, holding stock and stock trading has been immensely profitable, relatively low risk and require little if done reasonably and over long periods. More and more studies are affirming that simply buying index funds and holding them over long periods is _less_ risky than buying bonds. > Tax rates are carefully tuned to maximize tax revenue without unduly disincentivizing production. They reflect power relations and tax competition more than anything. > To change them purely based on vibes would be catastrophically stupid. Not based on "vibes". The people who actually generate wealth are workers and consumers, not stock holders. > Please don't vote. We should mutually respect our rights to vote even if we disagree.
    • iso1631 10mo ago
      Raising money through taxing wealth is far easier than raising money through taxing income when nobody has jobs.
  • woile 10mo ago
    We actually have "juridical person" in most countries. I think AI would be ideal for that
  • amelius 10mo ago
    > We also don't let steam engines and carts pay taxes just because they 'replace' (=displace) human labor. It is funny because in the copyright debate, AI is often treated as human. Like "we didn't steal your data, the AI just learned from it!"
    • kranke155 10mo ago
      They will use the analogy that’s most advantageous to them at any point.
  • estearum 10mo ago
    Just tax land. Problem solved.
• fainpul 10mo ago
  The problem is that rich people and large companies usually go to great lengths to avoid taxes, use loopholes or get special deals (and with great success). The missing tax income has to come from the middle class, who can't avoid it. With increased automation, this only gets more extreme.
  • wwweston 10mo ago
    Surely if we can recognize this, an AI worthy of the name would be able to recognize this at scale, and what can be recognized can be remediated… Or perhaps this could serve as a kind of test: a technology that cannot be reliably used in tax evasion enforcement simply isn’t worthy of the name AI. Or perhaps it reveals that we have structural problems, and certain concentrations of wealth with or without automation are a threat to the just and effective operation of society and should therefore be as vigorously opposed as crime or foreign attacks.
  • scotty79 10mo ago
    > The missing tax income has to come from the middle class, who can't avoid it. Taxes on labor are actually a method of extracting money form the rich capital owners. As you mentioned it's easy for the rich people to hide their wealth and avoid taxes on its growth. The one thing that was very hard for them to avoid or hide was purchasing labor which they had to do to enlarge their wealth. So governments taxed that. If governments lowered the taxes on labor it wouldn't mean middle class would earn more. It would only result in capital owners paying less for work. They always pay as little as possible and how little a person is willing to work for is the same, tax or no tax. Because money in hand is what counts. Of course since as labor is being replaced with automation this way of collecting tax on capital growth becomes less and less feasible, so things are bound to change.
  • b3lvedere 10mo ago
    "The missing tax income has to come from the middle class, who can't avoid it." So somewhere along the line it could be very beneficial to be poor on paper. Or are we going to blame these people for corruption while the (ultra) rich are doing this constantly? "It's good to be the king!" (Mel Brooks)
• useumix 10mo ago
  Directly taxing AI is very hard. Imagine if a company had to pay taxes for every AI agent operating in the U.S. or the E.U. As if they were regular employees. Big corporations would simply move the AI agents to countries without taxes.
  • sigmoid10 10mo ago
    It's actually trivial. AI apis are pretty streamlined by now. Just slap a tax on processed tokens and you're guaranteed to reach every AI agent out there. It already happens everywhere with sales tax for normal products. Just treat tokens as the product and create an extra tax for it.
    • katsura 10mo ago
      How will that work with local/offline agents? They are getting better and better.
      • marcyb5st 10mo ago
        Audits? Like it happens with licensed software. The issue is that if any country won't play ball with either not adding the taxes or by closing an eye, everyone is gonna put their datacentes there and become un-auditable. I guess the other countries can slap sanctions on them, but the people benefitting won't care really.
        • refurb 10mo ago
          Ohhh! Just imagine all the new IRS jobs and government powers that would be created!
    • scotty79 10mo ago
      You could tax the energy and subsidize it for individuals. It's the ultimate resource that all business uses. But that would mean unscrupulous countries could tax their energy less and attract AI farms. So probably you need to tax imported tokens (and other goods) as well. There could be many benefits of taxing grid energy instead of labor.