8 ms·

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 an

by vjk800 10mo 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 10mo ago
Where do you live? Are tractors not taxed as motor vehicles in your country?
- aarond0623 10mo ago
  Normally not unless they travel on public roads. If it's just used for farming it doesn't have to be registered.
- bluedino 10mo ago
  Nope. They even get to use fuel that has less taxes on it since they don't drive on public roads.
- cj 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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.
  - jlawson 10mo ago
    The problem is that for the vast majority of people to be psychologically healthy they must have a job. This isn't a societal decision, it's a reality about how humans are. The alternative is like feeding an animal instead of letting it live the lifestyle it's adapted for. That helps it in the moment but over time its capacities atrophy and it ends up weakened, twisted and harmed with nothing to spend its natural instincts on.
    - gwbas1c 10mo ago
      > The problem is that for the vast majority of people to be psychologically healthy they must have a job. This isn't a societal decision, it's a reality about how humans are. The "job" can be things like volunteering, artwork, finding a cause, inventing, raising children, teaching... Work can be subsidized and based around personal interest and achieve the "psychologically healthy" aspect that you describe.
      - 9rx 10mo ago
        > inventing When they used to say that you'd make more money going to university, that is what they were talking about. The idea was that if you went into the research labs you'd develop capital to multiply human output, which is how you make more money. Most ended up confusing the messaging with "go to university to get a job — the same job you would have done anyway..." and incomes have held stagnant as a result. It was an interesting dream, though. But not really what everyday normal people want. They like to have somewhere they can show up to and be told what to do, so to speak.
      - ori_b 10mo ago
        > volunteering Sure, I guess -- if you're not charging for your time, it's more efficient to use human labor than AI+robots. > inventing If we get working AI, humans will be unemployable at inventing useful things. > teaching There are already multiple startups trying to replace teachers in the classroom.
        10mo ago
ashleyn 10mo ago
This argument hinges rather strongly on whether or not AI is going to create a broad, durable, and lasting unemployment effect. Tractors did not cause this phenomenon because jevons paradox kicked in and induced demand rendered the problem moot, or demand eventually exceeded what mere tractors were capable of doing for agricultural productivity. The same can probably be said for contemporary AI, but it's tough to tell right now. There's some scant indications we've scaled LLMs as far as they can go without another fundamental discovery similar to the attention paper in 2017. GPT-5 was underwhelming, and each new Claude Opus is an incremental improvement at best, still unable to execute an entire business idea from a single prompt. If we don't continue to see large leaps in capability like circa 2021-2022, then it can be argued jevons paradox will kick in here and at best LLMs will be a productivity multiplier for already experienced white collar workers - not a replacement for them. All this being said, technological unemployment is not something that will be sudden or obvious, nor will human innovation always stay under jevons paradox, and I think policymakers need to seriously entertain taboo solutions for it sooner or later. Such as a WPA-style infrastructure project or basic income.
- renewiltord 10mo ago
  Basic income doesn’t do anything. We already have food stamps and so on. The largest sector of US federal spending is health and social welfare. We’d have to end pretty much all those programs to run a minuscule basic income.
  - dymk 10mo ago
    That’s a matter of where you get your taxes from. Plenty of corporations can afford to pay a more fair share. And studies on basic income have so far shown it to be effective.
    - jlawson 10mo ago
      Studies on basic income have shown that it's harmful to the people who receive it. They report no improvements on any measured outcome. Not lower stress, not more education, not better health. They work a bit less but that doesn't help them or their kids. Over the long term it harms them because their productive skills, values, and emotional capacities atrophy away from lack of use.
albumen 10mo ago
We didn’t tax tractors, but we did tax the expanded economy tractors enabled, and built institutions to manage the transition. Ex-farmhands had time to move into new jobs created by the Industrial Revolution, and it took decades. People also moved into knowledge work. What happens when AI takes all those jobs in far less time, with no other industries to offer employment? If AI makes a few people trillionaires while hollowing out the middle class, how do we keep the lights on?
- Gravityloss 10mo ago
  There is a scene of wealth transfer agent simulations. With some dynamics you easily end up in a situation where after enough transactions, all of the wealth is concentrated on one single agent. Think about "I am the state" but extended to the whole world. Billionaires trying to affect countries' elections seems child's play compared to that.
- IanCal 10mo ago
  > If AI makes a few people trillionaires while hollowing out the middle class, how do we keep the lights on? Tax the thing you care about? You don't need to care really about the definition of AI or what an AI is or anything like that, you care that some people got trillions. Tax "making an absolute shitton of money" or "being worth an insane amount". Taxing AI specifically means you're absolutely fucked if Altman turns out to not earn that much but someone who makes a specific connector to data centres is the richest person in the world. Is Nvidia an AI company? What is AI? *Who cares?* The point is to figure out some way as a society of continuing.
  - conductr 10mo ago
    Easy to say in a online forum, I imagine this could quite literally start a civil war in some nations.
hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago
We didn’t do X before therefore we shouldn’t do X today under very different circumstances is not a good argument. You’ve already stated what circumstances are different now.
testbjjl 10mo ago
Tractors replaced a task in specific fields, farming, construction largely. AI seems to have the potential to cover more territory. The potential blast radius is greater.
- dystopiandevel 10mo ago
  Agricultural jobs accounted for more than 80% of the preindustrial workforce. Granted you still needed people to maintain the jobs and some roles weren't entirely replaced or replaceable. I wonder how the two compare. I will say that AI has the opportunity to affect many lines of work which makes it scary for many.
  - 9rx 10mo ago
    80% was peak agriculture, but involvement was already in decline before the tractor. Necessarily so — nobody would have had time to create the tractor if they were still busy toiling in the field. The tractor was the final death knell, I suppose, but only around 40% of the workforce was involved in agriculture by the time the tractor started showing up on farms.
- erin_lave 10mo ago
  > AI seems to have the potential to cover more territory. Theoretically, the only two things that any human go to earn money is (a) use muscles or (b) use brains. I feel like AI plus robots covers all the territory. Maybe not quite yet - maybe we have a few more years, but what job could a human do that couldn't be done by an AI controlling a humanoid robot?
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
giancarlostoro 10mo ago
Pretty sure farmers don't buy them tax free? I'm sure they write some of the cost off, but they still foot the rest of the tax burden.
- jasode 10mo ago
  >Pretty sure farmers don't buy them tax free? [...], but they still foot the rest of the tax burden. To clarify, this isn't about the farmer paying a "sales tax" or VAT as % of the price of buying the tractor. The article is talking about something else: paying additional machine taxes to cover the loss of unemployed crop workers that would have been paying individual income taxes.
  - giancarlostoro 10mo ago
    Oh I get it, but I do find it silly, because that only means that the company running the models pay more in taxes for providing you with a service, which is weird to me. Especially if they keep costs down on goods and services, allowing us to focus on quality of output more. At least that's what Claude Code has done for my side projects.
- 9rx 10mo ago
  > Pretty sure farmers don't buy them tax free? I do. Agriculture products are zero-rated. But obviously it depends on jurisdiction.
Uehreka 10mo ago
These two waves of automation are fundamentally different and shouldn’t be compared. We got lucky that when farming was being mechanized, it happened slowly and while manufacturing was still growing and could soak up the labor. When manufacturing was offshored/automated, we got less lucky and a lot of people faced a massive drop in quality of life as they lost their high paying jobs and couldn’t find equivalent ones in the service sector. Now we’re seeing a potential massive job displacement, the force doing the displacing can likely also do many of the new jobs that may arise, and the change is happening faster than any ever before. Capitalism doesn’t promise to create new jobs when old ones are automated, we’ve just gotten lucky in the past, and our luck has run out.
__alexs 10mo ago
We did in a way. Tractors help produce more goods. Those goods incur VAT at the point of sale to consumers.
- wccrawford 10mo ago
  They don't "help produce more goods". They "reduce the need for human labor", enabling fewer people to produce as much as before. That's exactly what AI is doing.
9rx 10mo ago
> when almost everyone was employed in agriculture Employment was a product of the industrial revolution. In the age when most everyone worked in agriculture, they owned the farm operation. We didn't tax the tractor to bail out failing small businesses then, and I strongly suspect there is no will to tax AI to bail out failing small businesses that might succumb to AI today either. The population generally doesn't like small businesses and is more than happy to see them fail.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
KaiserPro 10mo ago
Tax is kinda tangential to all of this, but: > Tractors largely replaced human labour in farming about a hundred years ago And what happened around that time? yeah it wasn't a period of smooth calmness was it? Periods of massive changes in productivity (ie lots of people going into unemployment) causes huge societal changes. The thing that staved off revolution in the US was lots of spending, banking regulations, federal reserve, new deal and the like. Those that didn't do that, fell. So its less about who pays tax, and more about who is going to give money to the unemployed?
charles_f 10mo ago
If something transformative is just coming in and threatens the economic flows that sustains your social model, it is worth asking the question of how the economic flows should be proactively updated moving forward. The tractor created the middle class by giving more people access to jobs that paid better and provided more free time. It is yet to be proven who will benefit from the advancement of LLMs, but there is some consensus in the article that the large companies operating these LLMs will be. From there, proposing taxes on that additional profit doesn't seem ridiculous.
dboreham 10mo ago
> Should we have started taxing tractors? Tractors are taxed in Montana. We have a "business equipment tax" that works roughly like the tax on cars, but applies to assets that don't drive on the public highway such as tractors and other machinery. Republicans have waged a decades long campaign to reduce/abolish it though.

by vjk800 10mo ago

mastazi 10mo ago

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

aarond0623 10mo ago
Normally not unless they travel on public roads. If it's just used for farming it doesn't have to be registered.
bluedino 10mo ago
Nope. They even get to use fuel that has less taxes on it since they don't drive on public roads.
cj 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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.
- jlawson 10mo ago
  The problem is that for the vast majority of people to be psychologically healthy they must have a job. This isn't a societal decision, it's a reality about how humans are. The alternative is like feeding an animal instead of letting it live the lifestyle it's adapted for. That helps it in the moment but over time its capacities atrophy and it ends up weakened, twisted and harmed with nothing to spend its natural instincts on.
  - gwbas1c 10mo ago
    > The problem is that for the vast majority of people to be psychologically healthy they must have a job. This isn't a societal decision, it's a reality about how humans are. The "job" can be things like volunteering, artwork, finding a cause, inventing, raising children, teaching... Work can be subsidized and based around personal interest and achieve the "psychologically healthy" aspect that you describe.
    - 9rx 10mo ago
      > inventing When they used to say that you'd make more money going to university, that is what they were talking about. The idea was that if you went into the research labs you'd develop capital to multiply human output, which is how you make more money. Most ended up confusing the messaging with "go to university to get a job — the same job you would have done anyway..." and incomes have held stagnant as a result. It was an interesting dream, though. But not really what everyday normal people want. They like to have somewhere they can show up to and be told what to do, so to speak.
    - ori_b 10mo ago
      > volunteering Sure, I guess -- if you're not charging for your time, it's more efficient to use human labor than AI+robots. > inventing If we get working AI, humans will be unemployable at inventing useful things. > teaching There are already multiple startups trying to replace teachers in the classroom.
      - 10mo ago

ashleyn 10mo ago

This argument hinges rather strongly on whether or not AI is going to create a broad, durable, and lasting unemployment effect. Tractors did not cause this phenomenon because jevons paradox kicked in and induced demand rendered the problem moot, or demand eventually exceeded what mere tractors were capable of doing for agricultural productivity. The same can probably be said for contemporary AI, but it's tough to tell right now. There's some scant indications we've scaled LLMs as far as they can go without another fundamental discovery similar to the attention paper in 2017. GPT-5 was underwhelming, and each new Claude Opus is an incremental improvement at best, still unable to execute an entire business idea from a single prompt. If we don't continue to see large leaps in capability like circa 2021-2022, then it can be argued jevons paradox will kick in here and at best LLMs will be a productivity multiplier for already experienced white collar workers - not a replacement for them. All this being said, technological unemployment is not something that will be sudden or obvious, nor will human innovation always stay under jevons paradox, and I think policymakers need to seriously entertain taboo solutions for it sooner or later. Such as a WPA-style infrastructure project or basic income.

renewiltord 10mo ago
Basic income doesn’t do anything. We already have food stamps and so on. The largest sector of US federal spending is health and social welfare. We’d have to end pretty much all those programs to run a minuscule basic income.
- dymk 10mo ago
  That’s a matter of where you get your taxes from. Plenty of corporations can afford to pay a more fair share. And studies on basic income have so far shown it to be effective.
  - jlawson 10mo ago
    Studies on basic income have shown that it's harmful to the people who receive it. They report no improvements on any measured outcome. Not lower stress, not more education, not better health. They work a bit less but that doesn't help them or their kids. Over the long term it harms them because their productive skills, values, and emotional capacities atrophy away from lack of use.

albumen 10mo ago

We didn’t tax tractors, but we did tax the expanded economy tractors enabled, and built institutions to manage the transition. Ex-farmhands had time to move into new jobs created by the Industrial Revolution, and it took decades. People also moved into knowledge work. What happens when AI takes all those jobs in far less time, with no other industries to offer employment? If AI makes a few people trillionaires while hollowing out the middle class, how do we keep the lights on?

Gravityloss 10mo ago
There is a scene of wealth transfer agent simulations. With some dynamics you easily end up in a situation where after enough transactions, all of the wealth is concentrated on one single agent. Think about "I am the state" but extended to the whole world. Billionaires trying to affect countries' elections seems child's play compared to that.
IanCal 10mo ago
> If AI makes a few people trillionaires while hollowing out the middle class, how do we keep the lights on? Tax the thing you care about? You don't need to care really about the definition of AI or what an AI is or anything like that, you care that some people got trillions. Tax "making an absolute shitton of money" or "being worth an insane amount". Taxing AI specifically means you're absolutely fucked if Altman turns out to not earn that much but someone who makes a specific connector to data centres is the richest person in the world. Is Nvidia an AI company? What is AI? *Who cares?* The point is to figure out some way as a society of continuing.
- conductr 10mo ago
  Easy to say in a online forum, I imagine this could quite literally start a civil war in some nations.

hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago

We didn’t do X before therefore we shouldn’t do X today under very different circumstances is not a good argument. You’ve already stated what circumstances are different now.

testbjjl 10mo ago

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

dystopiandevel 10mo ago
Agricultural jobs accounted for more than 80% of the preindustrial workforce. Granted you still needed people to maintain the jobs and some roles weren't entirely replaced or replaceable. I wonder how the two compare. I will say that AI has the opportunity to affect many lines of work which makes it scary for many.
- 9rx 10mo ago
  80% was peak agriculture, but involvement was already in decline before the tractor. Necessarily so — nobody would have had time to create the tractor if they were still busy toiling in the field. The tractor was the final death knell, I suppose, but only around 40% of the workforce was involved in agriculture by the time the tractor started showing up on farms.
erin_lave 10mo ago
> AI seems to have the potential to cover more territory. Theoretically, the only two things that any human go to earn money is (a) use muscles or (b) use brains. I feel like AI plus robots covers all the territory. Maybe not quite yet - maybe we have a few more years, but what job could a human do that couldn't be done by an AI controlling a humanoid robot?

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

giancarlostoro 10mo ago

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

jasode 10mo ago
>Pretty sure farmers don't buy them tax free? [...], but they still foot the rest of the tax burden. To clarify, this isn't about the farmer paying a "sales tax" or VAT as % of the price of buying the tractor. The article is talking about something else: paying additional machine taxes to cover the loss of unemployed crop workers that would have been paying individual income taxes.
- giancarlostoro 10mo ago
  Oh I get it, but I do find it silly, because that only means that the company running the models pay more in taxes for providing you with a service, which is weird to me. Especially if they keep costs down on goods and services, allowing us to focus on quality of output more. At least that's what Claude Code has done for my side projects.
9rx 10mo ago
> Pretty sure farmers don't buy them tax free? I do. Agriculture products are zero-rated. But obviously it depends on jurisdiction.

Uehreka 10mo ago

These two waves of automation are fundamentally different and shouldn’t be compared. We got lucky that when farming was being mechanized, it happened slowly and while manufacturing was still growing and could soak up the labor. When manufacturing was offshored/automated, we got less lucky and a lot of people faced a massive drop in quality of life as they lost their high paying jobs and couldn’t find equivalent ones in the service sector. Now we’re seeing a potential massive job displacement, the force doing the displacing can likely also do many of the new jobs that may arise, and the change is happening faster than any ever before. Capitalism doesn’t promise to create new jobs when old ones are automated, we’ve just gotten lucky in the past, and our luck has run out.

__alexs 10mo ago

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

wccrawford 10mo ago
They don't "help produce more goods". They "reduce the need for human labor", enabling fewer people to produce as much as before. That's exactly what AI is doing.

9rx 10mo ago

> when almost everyone was employed in agriculture Employment was a product of the industrial revolution. In the age when most everyone worked in agriculture, they owned the farm operation. We didn't tax the tractor to bail out failing small businesses then, and I strongly suspect there is no will to tax AI to bail out failing small businesses that might succumb to AI today either. The population generally doesn't like small businesses and is more than happy to see them fail.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

KaiserPro 10mo ago

Tax is kinda tangential to all of this, but: > Tractors largely replaced human labour in farming about a hundred years ago And what happened around that time? yeah it wasn't a period of smooth calmness was it? Periods of massive changes in productivity (ie lots of people going into unemployment) causes huge societal changes. The thing that staved off revolution in the US was lots of spending, banking regulations, federal reserve, new deal and the like. Those that didn't do that, fell. So its less about who pays tax, and more about who is going to give money to the unemployed?

charles_f 10mo ago

If something transformative is just coming in and threatens the economic flows that sustains your social model, it is worth asking the question of how the economic flows should be proactively updated moving forward. The tractor created the middle class by giving more people access to jobs that paid better and provided more free time. It is yet to be proven who will benefit from the advancement of LLMs, but there is some consensus in the article that the large companies operating these LLMs will be. From there, proposing taxes on that additional profit doesn't seem ridiculous.

dboreham 10mo ago

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