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Comments (608)

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  doener
  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.
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  vjk800
  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).
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  dns_snek
  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.
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  epolanski
  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.
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  njarboe
  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).
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  aetherspawn
  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.
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  erehweb
  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.
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  phantom784
  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.
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  appreciatorBus
  By this logic owners of wheel barrows should be taxed for all the manual labour jobs the wheel barrow destroyed.
• RobertoG
  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.
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  Animats
  "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.
• Zigurd
  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.
• LastTrain
  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.
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  gargan
  No taxation without representation. AI Boston Tea Party follows. Leading to a new AI run nation aka Skynet...
• almosthere
  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?
• huevosabio
  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.
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  PaulKeeble
  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.
• cjbgkagh
  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.
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  brap
  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
• ekjhgkejhgk
  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.
• waffletower
  If I were a hedge fund shorting AI, I would nod and promote the message of this article.
• viralpoetry
  "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
• marvinblum
  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.
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  bombcar
  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?
• spankibalt
  In paradise, the unemployed pay taxes for being unemployed to the owners of "AI" systems. :*
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  jsemrau
  Wouldn't higher productivity also lead to higher profits? Which then should be taxed accordingly?
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  HarHarVeryFunny
  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?
• qgin
  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.
• gorgoiler
  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?
• raincom
  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.
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  Cthulhu_
  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.
• rnernento
  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%
• bloomingeek
  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-...
• mjanx123
  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.
• kgc
  If all goes as assumed in this thread, there will be more taxes because there will be higher profit margins at the corporate level.
• amdivia
  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)
• groestl
  Progressive tax on resource consumption, this is what a tax system for the next millennium looks like.
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  tga
  If AI replaces workers and pays taxes, should it also vote and receive social security?
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  hexasquid
  When I was young I imagined a future where nobody had to work because computers and robots could do it all.
• igleria
  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.
• _heimdall
  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.
• francisofascii
  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
• lazzurs
  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/1uphttps://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00hbdmj
• INTPenis
  Haha this is the problem, we're taxing work instead of taxing wealth.If AI is generating wealth for someone, should we tax it?
• nmeofthestate
  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.
• weddpros
  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…
• singingwolfboy
  https://archive.ph/trS1i
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  akabalanza
  AI is not replacing workers. Companies are. Thus what about taxing company profits?
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  thatjoeoverthr
  “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.
• tahoeskibum
  Agreed, we should have ATM machines pay taxes, and internet pay taxes for replacing stockbrokers and travel agents...
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  zkmon
  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.
• segmondy
  If AI doesn't replace workers, should workers that use software to be more productive pay more tax for using a smarter software?
• Havoc
  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.
• leviliebvin
  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.
• mitjam
  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.
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  fergie
  This article is actually a veiled, but sensible argument for less income tax and more wealth tax.
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  MLgulabio
  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.
• thedudeabides5
  Corporate taxes exist
• elnatro
  No. It doesn’t make sense. Should we charge taxes to our dishwasher? People, especially non-technical people, seem to be embellished by the words “AI” and forget that that’s not more than a mathematical and computational process that seems like an intelligent being.Funnily enough, the leader of the Sumar political party (junior member of the socialist government) was ridiculed by her words about AI (some weeks ago):https://www.elliberal.cat/2025/11/19/yolanda-diaz-hace-el-ri...
• gred
  If the telephone replaces errand boys, should it also pay taxes?
• veunes
  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
• default_
  Does your vacuum-cleaner pay taxes?
• tete
  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.
• ZiiS
  No taxation without representation is fairly fundamental.
• vatsachak
  Just tax profits
• setnone
  I wouldn't mind if it also pay fines for errors, hallucinations and lost time. Some artificial accountability you know.
• gethly
  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
• Bombthecat
  What we should do and what will happen are two different realities. Or dream and reality, depending on point of view :)
• alienbaby
  If it can consume public resources and has a vote, maybe?
• exabrial
  No, you should collect less taxes.
• kortilla
  No, just like neither the horse nor the steam engine paid taxes
• aszantu
  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?
• raincole
  I think no income should be taxes. We should tax assets.
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  komali2
  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...
• nrhrjrjrjtntbt
  That would be a window tax.
• anon
  undefined
• hansmayer
  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 :)
• general1465
  If it won't then it is effectively short circuiting whole capitalist society as we know itIf people are not working, then they have no income - Less taxes for stateIf they have no income, they can't buy stuff or services - Less taxes for stateIf companies can't sell stuff and services, they are going bankrupt - Less taxes for stateIf 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.
• iamgopal
  Nope, rather automation and AI should solve governance to the point that tax should be lower or abolished altogether.
• btbuildem
  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.
• Joel_Mckay
  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=yftBiNu0ZNUI look forward to likely having a cluster of heavily discounted GPUs in a few years. =3
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  yodsanklai
  Are we rediscovering Marx?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat
• d--b
  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.
• mikkupikku
  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?
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  stevenjgarner
  Taxes are to fund government. Isn't the idea for AI and robotics to replace government? No taxes.
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  halapro
  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.
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  ursAxZA
  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.
• photios
  > Tax all the things.EU in a nutshell.
• hatefulheart
  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.
• j45
  If software is machinery I’m not sure how that would work.
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  BrenBarn
  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.
• torginus
  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?
• azaras
  Reduce human working hours.
• refurb
  Should tax the cotton gin because it replaced workers? How about computers?
• KoftaBob
  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.
• hahahacorn
  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…
• dax3232
  really interesting
• jacknews
  Maybe the question should be 'should workers pay taxes'?
• wakawaka28
  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.
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  smitty1e
  Serious question: when will the AI generate the perfect taxation system/budget combination?
• k310
  Takeover artists and hatchetmen destroyed many thousands of jobs. Were they taxed or punished? Hell no, movies were made of them.Just saying ....
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  yapyap
  Should AI (?!) pay taxes? no. Should the big companies pay their FAIR share, yes!
• fedeb95
  if AI is smart, it will start its own union. Then we're fucked.
• elgriftero
  the left thinks in terms of grifthow to extract rents contributing nothing
• stego-tech
  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.
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  wtcactus
  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
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• nQQKTz7dm27oZ
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  drnick1
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  bofadeez
  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?
• bilekas
  I have to say I'm surprised at the sentiment here that the companies shouldn't be taxed a higher rate than currently.It's disingenuous to claim that companies are paying the fair amount of taxes on their earnings.Plainly speaking, the human labor who will be replaced pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes that corporations.https://observer.com/2024/11/sam-altman-openai-salary/Simple well known and preventable accounting tricks make the rich never need to pay a fair share. Yet regular people are now even seeing their electricity bills go up because they're using the infrastructure to such an extent.Yet the sentiment here is : Well don't be silly, they're making profits so they're paying taxes.They're not making a profit, yet they're reducing employment, increasing services bills for everyone else.https://www.iea.org/news/ai-is-set-to-drive-surging-electric...