alt Hacker NewsIf AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
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This is a powerfully stupid idea. The only reason to justify taxing income at all is because the government manages the relationship between employer and employee, and protects the employee from abuse - and even that's a bit shaky when it comes to income taxes, because the obligation to the government doesn't really scale up with income. Income taxes are new and weird. Other taxes are a lot easier to justify.
But the worst part is the idea of taxing automation and innovation. You might as well put a tax on intelligence and skill, because if you were dumber and hadn't learned anything, it would take more people to do your job. It's a comically stupid idea that no one is seriously considering.
It's just a distraction from taxing the usual suspects, the wealthy, who are more of a burden to government the more they own, and who are the least taxed they've ever been. Instead of being taxed by governments, they get direct cash grants, regulatory capture, intelligence agents and diplomats with a primary purpose of subverting and suborning foreign governments to their advantage, and perpetual wars to burn off their production.
The Western intellectual class is an annoying mix of morons and propagandists, often in the same person.
edit: US average wealth is 5x US median wealth.
Food for thought: "If AI replaces workers but doesn't pay taxes, should we also stop paying taxes?"
Just tax profits
If it won't then it is effectively short circuiting whole capitalist society as we know it
If people are not working, then they have no income - Less taxes for state
If they have no income, they can't buy stuff or services - Less taxes for state
If companies can't sell stuff and services, they are going bankrupt - Less taxes for state
If 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.
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.
Taxes are to fund government. Isn't the idea for AI and robotics to replace government? No taxes.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
No, just like neither the horse nor the steam engine paid taxes
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=yftBiNu0ZNU
I look forward to likely having a cluster of heavily discounted GPUs in a few years. =3
If software is machinery I’m not sure how that would work.
Reduce human working hours.
Should tax the cotton gin because it replaced workers? How about computers?
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.
Maybe the question should be 'should workers pay taxes'?
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…
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.
Serious question: when will the AI generate the perfect taxation system/budget combination?
Takeover artists and hatchetmen destroyed many thousands of jobs. Were they taxed or punished? Hell no, movies were made of them.
Just saying ....
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?
really interesting
Should AI (?!) pay taxes? no. Should the big companies pay their FAIR share, yes!
if AI is smart, it will start its own union. Then we're fucked.
the left thinks in terms of grift
how to extract rents contributing nothing
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.
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”.
This is the most hilarious ineffectual and defeatist copium I've read all month. Billionaires don't pay taxes. Getting there would first require billionaires paying their fair share of taxes, which is never going to happen in an extremely corrupt political environment. If the billionaires benefitting from the incessant destruction of workers' income equality were held to account, UBI would be a thing but that's not going to happen either with things the way they are at present. It's unsustainable and must change soon before extreme communist agitation comes to offer "salvation" to systematic mistreatment that won't benefit anyone.
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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?
> Tax all the things.
EU in a nutshell.
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...
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.