alt Hacker NewsIf AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
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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.
Government replaces workers with regulations, should it also pay taxes?
Haha this is the problem, we're taxing work instead of taxing wealth.
If AI is generating wealth for someone, should we tax it?
I dunno, should we incentivize the government to liquidate the workforce?
Should you pay more personal taxes because you do the job of three other people because you use better tools?
AI may replace some workers, but it won't replace the worker. Rather it will augment the worker. Even in software, where people are acting like recent graduates are having the ladder pulled up from them, I think this is just a lack of imagination. The same arguments could have been made of IDEs, debuggers and StackOverflow, but the industry isn't stupid. It still recognizes the need to learn and mentor actual human contributors. Whether we're in some hype-laden cycle or not, this is the truth.
As a young software engineer with a lot to learn, I would have been better off with ChatGPT or Claude than I was with experts exchange, reading manuals and banging my head on the wall until something worked. Often the SDKs I had to work with were inconsistent, buggy or required unsafe/undocumented features to accomplish basic things. I would not categorize the time I spent struggling with those arcane tools as productive learning. It was just "shit we had to deal with" to do the job.
So today, if you are a young engineer feeling like you are way behind, feeling like an imposter, feeling like you can't catch up to the industry: welcome to the club. I've been doing this for 20 years and those feelings are never far away. Instead of trying to lean on LLMs as a crutch, though, use your imagination! The tools we have now are what make us so much more productive. Use them, but don't let them use you. If you are learning especially, write the code, and let the LLM critique your work. Otherwise, give the LLM problems and ask it how it would solve it, and learn about the concepts that come out. Treat it like a Google search that just works way better and (for now) has no ads.
It's literally the same argument as how to use IDEs. The more you understand what it's doing, the better you will be at your job.
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.
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?
This is why there should be no income tax. Only corporate taxes and VAT / sales taxes.
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.
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.
This article is actually a veiled, but sensible argument for less income tax and more wealth tax.
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.
We don't want a rebellion sparked by 'Taxation without representation'. Do we?
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.
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.
If all goes as assumed in this thread, there will be more taxes because there will be higher profit margins at the corporate level.
Yes, but they only count as 3/5 a person.
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.
We've never taxed robots for the employees they replaced in manufacturing.
Whether it should or should not pay taxes is irrelevant.
Will it pay taxes? I think you know the answer.
If the telephone replaces errand boys, should it also pay taxes?
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
If AI doesn't replace workers, should workers that use software to be more productive pay more tax for using a smarter software?
If I were a hedge fund shorting AI, I would nod and promote the message of this article.
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...
“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.
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
AI is not replacing workers. Companies are. Thus what about taxing company profits?
I wouldn't mind if it also pay fines for errors, hallucinations and lost time. Some artificial accountability you know.
What we should do and what will happen are two different realities. Or dream and reality, depending on point of view :)
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...
The income tax was never meant to fall on flesh and blood citizens at all.
The original draft was a corporate excise tax. Only after the tariffs came down did the Wall Street/Progressive coalition widen the net to wages so the Federal Reserve’s new war-credit machine could be serviced by the very labor it would soon dilute through inflation.
An alternative to putting a tax on "AI workers" could be to restore the tariff wall that protected wages. I suspect I'll be downvoted for suggesting that though.
No taxation without representation is fairly fundamental.
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…
Nope, rather automation and AI should solve governance to the point that tax should be lower or abolished altogether.
If it can consume public resources and has a vote, maybe?
I think no income should be taxes. We should tax assets.
Does your vacuum-cleaner pay taxes?
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?
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 :)
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
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?
Corporate taxes exist
That would be a window tax.
The real question is if AI replaces labor, what will keep democracy in place?
People who advocate for things like UBI don't seem to realize that when voters don't have a share in the productivity of their nation, they become 100% a liability. The reason democracy persists is that the powers that be aren't incentivized to destroy democracy as it would harm them too. In 10 years that will no longer be the case. Arguably, you can already see this today as the future expectations affect the present.