alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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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
The issue I have with your proposal is that it discloses too much metadata to tax authorities in order to enforce compliance. They'll have an almost perfect map of the legal compute in their jurisdiction. Access to compute should be free to all and not gated by taxes.
Tax on electricity is already a thing. That can be adjusted and even be made progressive. Extra for fossils and so on.
> 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.
> Nobody calls alcohol duty “micromanagement”.
They don't, but it really is! There's different rates for different specific gravity and different processes.
Re: petrol, I note that the UK government is trying to replace this as part of the EV transition with a milage tax, which is proving controversial and fiddly.
Energy tax is a hugely fraught political issue. The "poster child" for cheap energy is a little old lady huddled over a 1kW one bar electric heater. Energy bills are a big "fixed" cost for households. Many small businesses have been affected by energy price rises - e.g. restaurants. And yet at the other end AI represents such a huge deployment of capital expenditure that it's distorting prices for everything else - energy, RAM, and so on.
I think I'd favor a "personal allowance" model similar to income tax, where you get the first X units of energy tax free and then have to pay VAT, carbon taxes etc. on the rest of it.