alt Hacker NewsIt 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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The end game you're describing (abundance with minimal labor) only works socially if we deliberately redesign distribution, not just production
I see a natural equilibrium with a tension: automation (also through AI) causes unit economics to drop and results in cheaper prices. At the same time, salaries for contributors grow because their impact is so high. So you end up with a new equilibrium of much cheaper prices and much higher salaries. What, however, about the people who can’t contribute? IMO the most natural and fair approach is to support (through whatever means) people’s “education”, allowing them to upgrade their skills so that they can contribute. IMO this leads to a new tension: not rich vs poor, or useful vs useless, but people who can up-level their skills vs those who don’t. And I think, at its extreme, it boils down to this: how much plasticity does your brain have? Because every other constraint, society can adapt or accommodate for.
I think the idea is that the trillionaires won't need us at all when the food supply is fully automated. They might keep a small population for genetic diversity, but that's about it.
Transition periods are always difficult, but they've always reached some equilibrium. Right now the spread between the two seem higher (not sure they are) but the system will bring them closer together.
You're completely omitting externalised cost, though. As it stands, all this production requires gargantuan amounts of energy that have to come from somewhere, and cause pollution and waste that must be accounted for. As long as these factors aren't solved—if they can be solved in the first place—either the prices for consumers or the manufacturing cost must reflect this, I don't see the increased degree automation affecting prices much.