This argument hinges rather strongly on whether or not AI is going to create a broad, durable, and lasting unemployment effect.

Tractors did not cause this phenomenon because jevons paradox kicked in and induced demand rendered the problem moot, or demand eventually exceeded what mere tractors were capable of doing for agricultural productivity.

The same can probably be said for contemporary AI, but it's tough to tell right now. There's some scant indications we've scaled LLMs as far as they can go without another fundamental discovery similar to the attention paper in 2017. GPT-5 was underwhelming, and each new Claude Opus is an incremental improvement at best, still unable to execute an entire business idea from a single prompt. If we don't continue to see large leaps in capability like circa 2021-2022, then it can be argued jevons paradox will kick in here and at best LLMs will be a productivity multiplier for already experienced white collar workers - not a replacement for them.

All this being said, technological unemployment is not something that will be sudden or obvious, nor will human innovation always stay under jevons paradox, and I think policymakers need to seriously entertain taboo solutions for it sooner or later. Such as a WPA-style infrastructure project or basic income.

We didn’t tax tractors, but we did tax the expanded economy tractors enabled, and built institutions to manage the transition.

Ex-farmhands had time to move into new jobs created by the Industrial Revolution, and it took decades. People also moved into knowledge work. What happens when AI takes all those jobs in far less time, with no other industries to offer employment?

If AI makes a few people trillionaires while hollowing out the middle class, how do we keep the lights on?

Tax is kinda tangential to all of this, but:

> Tractors largely replaced human labour in farming about a hundred years ago

And what happened around that time? yeah it wasn't a period of smooth calmness was it? Periods of massive changes in productivity (ie lots of people going into unemployment) causes huge societal changes.

The thing that staved off revolution in the US was lots of spending, banking regulations, federal reserve, new deal and the like. Those that didn't do that, fell.

So its less about who pays tax, and more about who is going to give money to the unemployed?

If something transformative is just coming in and threatens the economic flows that sustains your social model, it is worth asking the question of how the economic flows should be proactively updated moving forward.

The tractor created the middle class by giving more people access to jobs that paid better and provided more free time. It is yet to be proven who will benefit from the advancement of LLMs, but there is some consensus in the article that the large companies operating these LLMs will be. From there, proposing taxes on that additional profit doesn't seem ridiculous.

Where do you live? Are tractors not taxed as motor vehicles in your country?

Tractors replaced a task in specific fields, farming, construction largely. AI seems to have the potential to cover more territory. The potential blast radius is greater.

I'm not arguing for taxing AI (or tractors) -- but...if we made the wrong decision 100yrs ago, should we make the wrong decision again? It is worth debating.

Pretty sure farmers don't buy them tax free? I'm sure they write some of the cost off, but they still foot the rest of the tax burden.

We did in a way. Tractors help produce more goods. Those goods incur VAT at the point of sale to consumers.

These two waves of automation are fundamentally different and shouldn’t be compared.

We got lucky that when farming was being mechanized, it happened slowly and while manufacturing was still growing and could soak up the labor. When manufacturing was offshored/automated, we got less lucky and a lot of people faced a massive drop in quality of life as they lost their high paying jobs and couldn’t find equivalent ones in the service sector.

Now we’re seeing a potential massive job displacement, the force doing the displacing can likely also do many of the new jobs that may arise, and the change is happening faster than any ever before.

Capitalism doesn’t promise to create new jobs when old ones are automated, we’ve just gotten lucky in the past, and our luck has run out.

We didn’t do X before therefore we shouldn’t do X today under very different circumstances is not a good argument.

You’ve already stated what circumstances are different now.

> Should we have started taxing tractors?

Tractors are taxed in Montana. We have a "business equipment tax" that works roughly like the tax on cars, but applies to assets that don't drive on the public highway such as tractors and other machinery. Republicans have waged a decades long campaign to reduce/abolish it though.

> when almost everyone was employed in agriculture

Employment was a product of the industrial revolution. In the age when most everyone worked in agriculture, they owned the farm operation.

We didn't tax the tractor to bail out failing small businesses then, and I strongly suspect there is no will to tax AI to bail out failing small businesses that might succumb to AI today either. The population generally doesn't like small businesses and is more than happy to see them fail.