alt Hacker News“Boo capitalism” on the outside, AI personhood on the inside. Actual agenda: disposable moral vehicles. AI liability is the goal.
A tax on corporate profits is a tax on cost cutting already.
A tax on “AI” is a way to compartmentalize. But you can’t, and you shouldn’t.
First, you won’t be able to formalize which gains are “AI” and which are not. Is it deep learning? If so, a gunshot detector is taxed and a McDonald’s touch screen is not. Is that what you want?
Second, a host of labor savings that don’t look like “robotics” or “AI” are also not covered. If you increase the MTBF on a traffic light, you cut the labor of light replacement. Is this morally different than a McDonald’s kiosk?
What about the traffic light itself? Shouldn’t that be a cop with a whistle?
We can do this all day.
I don't think it's overly complicated. We could create a corporate tax which inversely factors human salaries in relation to created value/profits. It's not an AI tax, but rather an automation tax. Since salaries are taxed, it seems sensible to divert those losses for the collective elsewhere. After all, robots are ultimately not consuming any goods or services with personal income. The profit has to come from somewhere. Along the distribution of resources, collective infrastructure and social services need to be maintained and payed by taxes. You could alternatively tax the money spent, but this creates wrong incentives, I think, and the burden would be unfairly distributed (e.g. everybody has to eat about the same amount). As long, as we don't have something like universal income/wealth redistribution, "efficiency" in automation is parasitic for the collective and shouldn't be incentivized by essentially tax cuts. As long as the collective's needs are met, it doesn't matter if humans or machines did the work.
Basically if you got a business which creates a certain amount of value, the collectives' total tax income (considering possible employees' income tax) should be the same, independently of people employed and paid. 500M profit from fully automated web hosting should result effectively in the same collective tax income as 500M profit from a factory employing 10K people.
Note: I am throwing all "taxes" in a bucket. E.g. humans need health insurance, therefore the fully automated business tax needs to reflect these costs too.