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.