This is not an easy question. It seemingly boils down to: what are fair ways to extract value from citizens for the shared value of the state?

However, the root questions are: what should the state provide, how much, and of what nature? A secondary question then becomes how important the redistributive aspect is. That’s what you’re seemingly alluding to when you say: people work, get taxed on it, but others automate that work and this automation does not get taxed.

Following that line of thinking makes sense, but it also contradicts the core benefit of automation, which is to delete non-needed work, make things cheaper, and make the value creator richer.

If the goal of redistribution is usually that “more” people reach a higher standard of living, then adding taxes and friction to processes like automation may conflict with that goal, given that automation is arguably one of the strongest natural drivers of higher living standards overall.

Of course, the counterpoint to “what and how much should the state provide” is “who should pitch in, and how much,” which is what you’re focusing on. I mostly agree that everyone should be taxed fairly, but I also see many exemption cases, because taxes are friction and we often want certain things to be frictionless. For example, I would oppose taxes on life-saving surgeries. But where do you draw the line? What about automation that indirectly enables or improves life-saving surgery?

What if I build and manage a dark factory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)) and it produces gizmos.

Since all my competitors are also running dark factories, we compete essentially on source materials + energy (assuming we have similar design/quality). Margin would be eventually razor thin. The dark factory does not make much capital gains, even as it produces 1,000 gizmo per second.

The capital gain is not much , but since we have only a handful of employees, that is enough to pay everyone a decent wage, after paying for the factory itself, source materials and energy.

How much tax do we expect to get from this gizmo company ? 10 years ago, to produce the same gizmos, I needed 5,000 employees, the unit price was way higher, and had higher revenue. But since AI and dark factories came, the prices cratered, instead of 5,000 jobs, we only have 5 jobs to produce the same.

Sure the 4,995 unemployed might be able to afford the gizmo, but the state does not receive the same taxes. So what happens to those 4,995 unemployed people ? who is paying for their health benefits and social security (retirement) ?

I am wondering how best to solve that equation ?

It is already taxed as capital gains though. Software (including AI), if sold either in isolation or with the entire company does trigger capital gains considerations.

If you're referring to some equivalent of wealth tax or inverse of accounting for deprecations in terms of assets, then that seems pretty problematic. 1) how do you asset the value of something until someone pays something for it? Unlike homes, where you can compare roughly to those around you, this seems much more dynamic for software / AI. 2) Let's say we are able to assess the value, so now a startup with software but no revenue has to pay taxes? Where does the money come from?

What is the correct capital gains tax rate?

I'm not sure I'm following your thought on capital gains tax.

Capital Gain tax occurs when you sell an asset for more than you paid for it.

AI (software) is not an asset, and I'm not sure how you'd sell it. Computers and robots are assets (although they typically depreciate not appreciate.)

Either way capital gains tax is applied to the asset not the productivity of the asset. The productivity in turn is taxed as part of income tax.

Perhaps I have misunderstood your point though?

So the remaining 3 workers will be paying 100% of tax. Doesn’t seem fair to me.

its not in the convo because these capital high intensities are the ones lobbying and owning the politicians. they're each other friends. taxes were always intended even in this country to be a thing applied to serfdom: we weren't in reality immune from the conditions we aimed to flee from Great Britain where kings and queens gained qualified immunity and sovereign status - sometimes it seems like are just a "free" slave nation.

States not being able to regulate this is dangerous. A close friend of mine has given up on reality and talks about Roberto the love of her life the one she always wanted and Roberto is chatGPT :-(. She previously mentioned she didnt like chatGPT 5.0 cause it wasnt as agreeable yet now she says 5.1 is better.. back to how it was before 5.0 and now out of the blue mentioned Roberto.

chatGPT is a sypcophant and without regulation any AI company can and or will juice their algorithms so their AI system becomes cocaine for the millions of lonely to unsatisfied people out there.

My friend has a partner of 30 years but their relationship is that of roommates. If you think she is not you that might be correct but you know someone like her and possibly many like her. Unsatisfied, not able to get that movie type love / romance / fantasy and now unfetterd AI can get these people hooked like cocaine and into the depth of zero reality!

The real issue should not be whether they're paying the government. The issue is whether they're paying us for taking the human content of the last two thousand years and baking it into their generators.

How do we get royalties on this, like our share of the oil proceeds if we were citizens of Qatar? How do we trade our share of the contribution? There's twenty years of my posting on Reddit, Slashdot, HN, and other forums, that we know for a fact has been used in these frontier models. Great... where's my royalty check?

Pay us, not the government. We'll have to pay taxes regardless, and yes, close the tax loopholes on security-based capital gains (don't tax me for all the investment in my primary residence, that's a double dip).

I heard this called "Coasian" economics (as in Coase). I'm not sure what that actually means, though.

Ultra-wealthy individuals legally minimise their tax liability by:

Receiving a relatively low official salary (Bezos's Amazon salary was $81,840 for many years).

Not receiving dividends, so the wealth remains in stock that is not taxed annually.

Borrowing money against their stock holdings to fund their lifestyle. Loans are not considered income and are therefore not taxable, and the interest on the loans can sometimes be used as a deduction.

> But you cannot seriously argue that capital owners "avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems".

Sure we can. Peter Thiel managed to put $5 billion in his Roth IRA.

https://www.propublica.org/article/billionaires-tax-avoidanc...

"Using stock deals unavailable to most people, Thiel has taken a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall... What’s more, as long as Thiel waits to withdraw his money until April 2027, when he is six months shy of his 60th birthday, he will never have to pay a penny of tax on those billions."

Numbers, from the article:

> In the United States, for example, about 85% of federal tax revenue comes from labor income,

That means only 15% is coming from all other taxes, including corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, and other taxes on the wealthy (estate taxes), mostly because they find creative ways -- and loopholes by design -- that allow them to reduce those taxes significantly.

What a naive position. People hate to pay taxes, the more they have to pay, the more they avoid it. Megacorps openly hiding money in fiscal paradises are the tip of the iceberg. Companies, and individuals, at every level, try to pay as little as possible, becoming as creative as the methods their wealth can unlock.

If billionaires (soon to be trillionaries) paid as much taxes as their wealth disparity compared to the middle class, a significant percent of the population would be exempt from taxes by the sheer insignificance of their contribution, and I don't mean only the poorest people.

The whole reason for the use of "pay their fair share" while never actually defining what the fair share is supposed to be. It's solely about hit & run propaganda. Avoiding discussing actual numbers is a requirement to the politics.

> Can we have a grown up discussion

starting your reply with an insult, great way to spark "grown up discussion"

> This is a bad deal. Capital makes the marginal worker more productive, not less.

Why should workers care about being more productive if they do not reap the rewards in terms of wages?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_of_wages_from_produ...

It's not a matter of a "deal" to be made or agreed to, it's a matter of paying a fair share of the cost to organize a society. When Capital gets to reap dual benefits of revenue from business prospects and lobbying government directly to set the tax rules, then it can't ALSO offload outlaying to the public good that it DEPENDS on to make a profit.

Avoiding tax through various loopholes that Capital gets a seat at the table to help craft, while benefitting from externalizing the costs to taxing labor is just corruption.

Workers make capital productive.

If your argument were true we should set taxes on capital to zero, which is quite obviously a bad idea.

> Capital makes the marginal worker more productive, not less. You can tax the worker and she will still be better off than if you had taxed the capital, due to greater productivity.

Point one: higher productivity is not necessarily our goal. I could think of numerous industries that would make the world better if they did less work.

Point two: There's a moral absurdity in taxing the wages earned by labor more heavily than the returns earned by ownership. One is tangible effort, the other is an abstraction backed by law. If anything, taxing capital should be the baseline, because it's the least tied to survival. Historically, when America was at its most broadly prosperous, capital gains and corporate profits were taxed at far higher rates than today.

Point three: AI intensifies that calculus. If AI is deployed by capital to further replace or devalue labor, then taxing only the worker is punishing the displaced while rewarding the displacer. That's pure extraction. If we want social systems to survive, the burden has to fall on the owners of the machines, not the people being replaced by them.

Genuinely one of the largest and most destructive ills of our society right now is that so tremendously more of our shared prosperity as a system is directed to those who do the least to create it.

> You can tax the worker and she will still be better off than if you had taxed the capital, due to greater productivity.

This assumes the worker is the one benefiting from the productivity gains. We're just worked more and we don't get the added value.

You are assuming:

1. Value created for other shareholders is a good thing

2. $ "value" directly translates to actual resources or services

3. These employees and customers would not get the same or more value elsewhere if Amazon did not exist

4. This "value" created by Amazon is better compared to the alternative (such as more resources used locally instead of global trade)

One thing to point out that is lost in these arguments of “they create value for the shareholders”.

Folks that own a vast amount of stock do not pay taxes on that stock. They own the shares, and they take out loans against those shares. At some point they rollover or pay off those loans by selling some shares, but the shares have increased in value significantly in that time, or they’ve been granted new shares.

When we say “<business> has created value for shareholders”, it’s said in a way that implies that somehow that wealth creation makes its way into the tax system by virtue of the fact the wealth was ‘created’. It does not.

> That's $2.4 trillion of value created for other shareholders plus trillions more for employees, customers, suppliers, governments, and other stakeholders.

That's not Bezos' doing alone, that's Bezos plus over a million workers that did that. If Bezos never existed in history, someone else would have filled in that market. We need to stop this myth that a few men alone create all this value and that without them we'd still be dragging plows through the mud for our farms.

I would say they dont contribute. I don't think Jeff Bezos has contributed anything positive, at all. He's managed to become insanely rich in a system that rewards bad behavior, so what? All that value isnt doing anything.

> It’s much easier to tax the general population than businesses, as they don’t push back as much.

Businesses don't pay taxes. People do. Every dime that a corporation pays is a reduction of capital returns to shareholders, or a reduction of investment into business activity, both of which are taxed again by the people who ultimately receive the capital.

Yep, concentration of wealth leads to a smaller group of people that buy their way out of taxation leading to further concentration of wealth and services falling apart for the masses.

Businesses can play the game where they shop around various municipalities and get them in a race-to-the-bottom on tax breaks if they move their business to their community.

I was mind blown when i found that this is a major investment thesis in argentina.

That is the opposite of a problem - it emerges because we have tools that make things more efficient than just throwing toiling bodies at it. We had economies which were based upon it, it was called slavery. Capital compounding its gains through better capital is how we get progress. The presense or absense of the capital advantage is part of what separates third world wages from first world.

The industrial era problem isn't capital but that economies of scale encourage consolidation heavily and make running small business an even more uphill battle. There is at least a counterbalancing force of competitive pressure and antitrust to promote some splitting for innovation's sake as opposed to just one big stagnant monopoly winning out just because it is biggest.

This covers federal income taxes only, excluding payroll taxes such as Social Security and Medicare. Including those the top 1% pays ~25% of all federal taxes while earning ~22% of all income.

Top 1% have more income (income inequality is a thing). Taking away 40% income would hit the bottom 99% much harder than it would affect the life of top 1%. 50% of renters spend >30% on housing, 25% spend >50%.

40% figure is also based on individual income taxes. It drops significantly if you consider other sources (payroll etc).

Top 1% also receive preferential tax treatment and benefits disproportionately from policy changes.

This isn't about income.

The top 1% of earners aren't the capital owners, not even close.

You're missing the point. The effective tax rate of many billionaires is lower than ours. "Musk with a fortune of $244 billion, paid an average effective tax rate of 24% from 2018 to 2020". In other years it was as low as 3%[2].

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/income-taxes-billionaire-tax-ra...

[2] https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...

Are they though? At least for AI/software the last 30 years were fantastic to have universal access to means of production (compilers, tools, operating systems, models, you name it).

I am more worried about the capability of people to use the free means of production (more precisely improve education) rather than the concentration.

Edit: and to remove any doubt, I do agree that taxation of capital is completely badly done now, but I do not think the capital is about owning the means of production but about the capital (effort) required to organize people to use the (mostly) free means of production.

The top 1% arent the problem. The top <=0.001% are the problem.

Capital owners don't produce useful things. Their workers do.

And so you can easily turn that argument around: the workers who actually produce the useful things are, for some reason, taxed higher than the owner who didn't lift a finger to produce anything, but is entitled to all the profits by virtue of being the capital owner.

I was so with you the first half of that. But the notion that everything should be capitalism is just as wrong as the notion that nothing should be capitalism (or, that capitalism only leads to bad things; obviously wrong but somehow a broadly accepted truism).

Capitalism works when a market works; capitalism fails when a market fails. Healthcare is a great example, because there’s an obvious and inherent imbalance in demand vs supply. Firefighting is another great example. These also have externalities to the community as a whole that everyone gets, even when you don’t pay/need the service; so it makes sense to make everyone pay (taxes). Even if you never have a child, even if you send your kids to private school, you live in a society that could only exist because of a (formerly, relatively) high standard of public education. So everyone pays for schools.

The idea of government bureaucrats lining their pockets is also (formerly, relatively) ridiculous: who would get into US government bureaucracy to make money? They are all (formerly, relatively) doing it almost uniformly because they believe in the mission, because they would almost all make more money going private.

i haven’t had my coffee yet, but i’m going to need to see this sentence diagrammed out.

... which is a different topic.

This thread is about the fair taxation of AI, if any.

> One can’t spend any of the money until it becomes personal assets.

The oldest trick in the book is to use unrealized gains as collateral for loans - we even have banks specializing in this.

Oh, and the US has a law that erases the tax bill for dead people - you'd be stupid not to use this trick.

After world war 2, most of the western world had wealth taxes. The US had eg. >90% income taxes, and death taxes of up to 77% on inherited wealth.

You know, exactly that span of time that everyone agrees on being really prosperous.

While I probably prefer a society that is more "for the many", I can't exclude the possibility that some people have different preferences and would not want to impose my opinion.

Considering this, everybody might have to make (at some point in their lives) hard choices regarding where they choose to live. Yes, one should fight to improve the society one is living in, but there is also a saying "only the fool persists in their folly" ...

Why should productivity and corporate tax rates be correlated at all, up or down? The link there is not obvious.

If productivity increases, margins increase. When margins increase any business in a competitive environment will have to lower its prices in response to any other business lowering prices that got those automation gains.

Productivity increases result in lower prices in any competitive market.

> but successive neoliberal governments continue to lower corporate taxes.

By itself it wouldn't be a problem, the problem is at the same time they raise taxes for people doing OK, and salaries are mostly stagnating.

It's the ultimate capital amplifier. The end goal - AGI - essentially means the ability to derive wealth from capital directly, without any pesky middlemen such as laborers who need to be paid. The endgame is capital without labor.

But, of course, in such a society, the people who don't own the robots - i.e. most of us - become "economically unnecessary".

It removes a layer of abstraction from capital to production. With AI the only question is if the compute is available to purchase, once it is, you can produce with it.

Of course, the question then is who is consuming the production, but we're not quite there yet.

Most governments in the world exist to protect the interests of capital owners. Which makes sense - the creation of states in the first place was an act of, shall we say, radical capital acquisition.

Yes by having the Federal Reserve print more money!

The government is fiscally irresponsible fundamentally because the rich have successfully lobbied to prevent taxes from being collectible in sufficient quantity to balance the budget. Once you're at the point where the gap cannot politically be closed - "responsible" budgeting is just an exercise in posturing and lobbying exercises.

> The current interest on our national debt is greater than our military spending.

For quite some time, my mortgage interest was larger than my principal.

That didn’t make it fiscally irresponsible.

When Trump did the whole tax cut thing in 2017, it massively blew up the national debt. This is because the rich got massive tax cuts.

The government is fiscally irresponsible by design, because the government is ran by the plutocrats with all the incentives to give themselves more money at the cost of everyone else.

>Taxes should be levied on companies and robots, not humans doing everyday things.

This is also a slippery slope. As slippery as taxing individuals, property etc.

I wouldn't discount the collective power and ingenuity of a few billion oppressed people.

> income tax

They don't get money through income! They get most of it through capital gains or unrealized capital gains which are taxed at special low rates and zero rates respectively.

It's transparently self-serving and completely indefensible -- though I'm sure you'll try.

If we limited individual wealth to $999 million--just outright capped it, and enforced that--it would not impact these people in the slightest.

What it would impact is how easily these people could influence the political system and get themselves out of trouble.

At $400 billion net worth, Elon Musk could retire one hundred thousand times. He literally wrote multi-million dollar checks to various politicians and ran an illegal pay-for-votes scheme in Pennsylvania. And he'll face zero consequences for it.

Top 1% of the US holds 30% of the country's wealth

Bottom 50% only 2% of wealth

50% of the economy my ass, these takes don't even pass basic accounting logic these days

> How about the rich say that 50% of the economy should pay their fair share?

Someone with $1b of assets gets far more value from a modern stable western society than someone with $10k of assets

> How about the rich say that 50% of the economy should pay their fair share?

How exactly do you propose that they pay their fair share when they literally do not have the money or assets to do so? Are you proposing modern day slavery? Perhaps people selling their family? I'm curious what happens if you take this line of thought to it's actual conclusion.

I did a bit of mild googling.

1% of Americans control 30% of the wealth of the nation, and apparently 12% of property.

It's more than reasonable that people with that much wealth to their name pay the vast majority of the taxes, as it used to be.

From a nation building perspective, there's no reason to allow a couple hundred people to wield 52,000,000,000,000$ worth of assets. It means the economy has gotten far too clumpy and needs some redistribution. This isn't even really all that anti-capitalist. Capitalism can't survive long term without budding up against a government that regulates it.

A capitalist system is built on the idea that holders of capital actually deploy that capital, rather than horde it.

If capital holders don’t actually deploy that capital and compete with each other, then you don’t have a capitalist system anymore. You have a feudal system, where asset holders extract resources through rents, rather than capital deployment and risk taking.

Sorta depends on where one draws the line, but the line you are drawing, suggest there should be no government, so "system not working as intended"

Yeah, and they should pay more.

> I often ask myself whether that is ethical or not. But in the end, it’s not the tooling that’s unethical. Productivity increases are good for everyone, under normal circumstances.

So if I'm reading your comment right, you think it would be ethical under normal circumstances, but also believe we don't live under those normal circumstances? In that case i think the answer you're looking for is: it is not ethical to develop these tools under the current circumstances.

If your tooling gains attention, will you take seed money from rich VCs?

When the product succeeds and you get offers to exit, would you sell to the uber-wealthy? They will exploit your user's data and collect the gains.

Those are the questions you should be honestly asking yourself when considering your own ethics. What's your price?

Taxes discourage whatever you're taxing, but we like consumption, so why tax it? Sales taxes discourage velocity of money. Not such a good idea. Instead, impose an income tax, designed to be progressive to protect lower income households.

> technological unemployment is not something that will be sudden or obvious

I already have friends experiencing technological unemployment. Programmers suddenly need backup plans. Several designers I know are changing careers. Not to mention, the voiceover artist profession will probably cease to exist besides this last batch of known voices. Writer, editor - these were dependable careers for friends, once. A friend travelled the world and did freelance copyediting for large clients.

ChatGPT was just released three years ago.

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

I think GP's argument makes a pretty strong case that it won't, even if AI somehow successfully automates 99% of all currently existing tasks. We automated away 99% of jobs once during the agricultural revolution and it didn't result in "a broad, durable, and lasting unemployment effect" then. Quite the opposite in fact.

Maybe if AI actually automates 100% of everything then we'll need to think about this more. But that seems unlikely to happen anytime in the foreseeable future given the current trajectory of the technology. (Even 50% seems unlikely.)

When most of the human population were farmers should we have taxed advances in agriculture which destroyed the everybody’s job?

> The same can probably be said for contemporary AI, but it's tough to tell right now

The same can't even be said for contemporary AI, because lots of the jobs it's going to replace are theoretical or hype. Self-driving cars should've been here years ago, but because AI is extremely hard to improve upon once it gets to a certain level of efficacy, they haven't happened.

The question is: should we be discussing this stuff when AI hasn't started taking all those jobs yet?

> each new Claude Opus is an incremental improvement at best, still unable to execute an entire business idea from a single prompt.

If your way of evaluating the progress of AI is a binary one, then you'll see no progress at all until suddenly it passes that bar.

But seeing that we do have incremental improvements on essentially all evals (and my own experience), even if it takes another decade we should be planning for it now. Even if it does require an entirely fundamental breakthrough like the attention paper, given the amount of researchers working on it, and capital devoted to it, I wouldn't put any money against such a breakthrough arriving before long.

>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.

The NBA has an incredibly high demand for 14-foot-tall basketball players, but none have shown up to apply. Similarly, if this causes our economy to increase demand for people to "execute an entire business ide from a single prompt", it does not mean unemployment can be alleviated by moving all the jobless into roles like that.

We don't need science fiction AI that will put everyone out of work for it to be ruinous. We only need half-assed AI good enough that they don't want to pay a burgerflipper to flip burgers anymore, and it'll all go to hell.

Basic income doesn’t do anything. We already have food stamps and so on. The largest sector of US federal spending is health and social welfare. We’d have to end pretty much all those programs to run a minuscule basic income.

I think you're basing AI only on modern 2025 LLMs.

If there is a magnitude increase in compute (TPUs, NPUs, etc) over the next 3-5 years then even marginal increases in LLM usability will take white collar jobs.

If there is an exponential increase in power (fusion) and compute (quantum) combined with improvements in robotics and you're in the territory where humans can entirely be replaced in all industries (blue collar, white collar, doctors, lawyers, etc).

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

Tax the thing you care about? You don't need to care really about the definition of AI or what an AI is or anything like that, you care that some people got trillions.

Tax "making an absolute shitton of money" or "being worth an insane amount". Taxing AI specifically means you're absolutely fucked if Altman turns out to not earn that much but someone who makes a specific connector to data centres is the richest person in the world. Is Nvidia an AI company? What is AI? *Who cares?* The point is to figure out some way as a society of continuing.

There is a scene of wealth transfer agent simulations. With some dynamics you easily end up in a situation where after enough transactions, all of the wealth is concentrated on one single agent. Think about "I am the state" but extended to the whole world. Billionaires trying to affect countries' elections seems child's play compared to that.

Normally not unless they travel on public roads. If it's just used for farming it doesn't have to be registered.

If we tax at the state level like motor vehicles, what happens when AI living in a Texas datacenter replaces 1 million jobs in Florida? The people are in Florida, but the money goes to Texas.

Nope.

They even get to use fuel that has less taxes on it since they don't drive on public roads.

Agricultural jobs accounted for more than 80% of the preindustrial workforce. Granted you still needed people to maintain the jobs and some roles weren't entirely replaced or replaceable. I wonder how the two compare. I will say that AI has the opportunity to affect many lines of work which makes it scary for many.

> AI seems to have the potential to cover more territory.

Theoretically, the only two things that any human go to earn money is (a) use muscles or (b) use brains.

I feel like AI plus robots covers all the territory. Maybe not quite yet - maybe we have a few more years, but what job could a human do that couldn't be done by an AI controlling a humanoid robot?

The wrong decision wasn't using productivity enhancers - it was building a society around the idea that everyone MUST have a job, even in the presence of substantial productivity enhancers which massively decrease the number of jobs. We've scraped by so far... so far.

>Pretty sure farmers don't buy them tax free? [...], but they still foot the rest of the tax burden.

To clarify, this isn't about the farmer paying a "sales tax" or VAT as % of the price of buying the tractor.

The article is talking about something else: paying additional machine taxes to cover the loss of unemployed crop workers that would have been paying individual income taxes.

> Pretty sure farmers don't buy them tax free?

I do. Agriculture products are zero-rated. But obviously it depends on jurisdiction.

They don't "help produce more goods". They "reduce the need for human labor", enabling fewer people to produce as much as before.

That's exactly what AI is doing.

Thank you, I keep reading these discussions and rarely see anyone touch on power and environmental factors.

How does more pollution/waste equal higher consumer cost? Do you mean because we'll have to pay more taxes because we'll need more publicly funded resources to clean up the excess waste? Or because corporations would pass the price of the fines for violating environmental regulations onto consumers?

That has nothing to do with this, those are things that should still be solved at a much higher level of abstraction. Tax the energy, pollution, waste - those have problems regardless of what caused them.

That is a game thoery approach but it completely fails in the face of reality.

The reality is that the floor to become "useful" is relatively low, which means the few billioanires have a large pool of potentially useful people of which they only employ some, leading to no greater salaries due to labour competition.

The other potentially useful workers cannot pool together and compete as the barrier of entry in the sector is prohibitely high.

So a natural moat emerges over cost of setting up a company, workers beg for a job of which they will take for a small wage and a few billioanires control the market.

This is a much closer approximation to the market we currently see

Yeah, that definitely won't work at scale. The bar for what constitutes being "educated" keeps increasing. Previously it was knowing how to code, now it is having an ML PhD, for example. At the same time, AI keeps getting more and more capable, so no matter how much "education" you have, AI will eventually get to you.

In any case, the argument won't work for majority of the population without a college degree. Are you going to have 50+ year old truck drivers upskilling in a fancy new tool to keep a job? And again, how long until that new skill you upgraded them to is now done by AI as well.

> salaries for contributors grow

I dont see that happening

This is the only correct answer.

I believe unfortunately it’s intractable because humans cannot successfully align incentives and actions at a scale large enough required to solve it

World wars, revolutions, and violence are how we've reached equilibrium in the past.

We could, conceivably, learn from our mistakes and do something different now. But we're not.

There is no "system" to bring them together. Historically only revolutions and mainly violent protests have helped.

The same place they've always gone: to consumers purchasing the products made by those automated processes.

The average person now is far wealthier in terms of actual purchasing power than the average person 100 years ago, and that's largely because of automation making everything cheaper.

ElPais is the most important (by number of readers) Spanish newspaper.

This also makes labor laws much less effective because the companies move countries to avoid them.

If anything, US AI companies will be eating the lunches of workers from all over the world. It'll be like a service export.

Taxing wealth is much harder on a practical and algorithmic level than taxing income.

But either way, taxing the tool is micromanaging the problem, and some powerful people cynically promote that because they can aim the details away from themselves.

> We also don't let steam engines and carts pay taxes just because they 'replace' (=displace) human labor.

It is funny because in the copyright debate, AI is often treated as human. Like "we didn't steal your data, the AI just learned from it!"

We actually have "juridical person" in most countries. I think AI would be ideal for that

Just tax land.

Problem solved.

Surely if we can recognize this, an AI worthy of the name would be able to recognize this at scale, and what can be recognized can be remediated…

Or perhaps this could serve as a kind of test: a technology that cannot be reliably used in tax evasion enforcement simply isn’t worthy of the name AI.

Or perhaps it reveals that we have structural problems, and certain concentrations of wealth with or without automation are a threat to the just and effective operation of society and should therefore be as vigorously opposed as crime or foreign attacks.

"The missing tax income has to come from the middle class, who can't avoid it."

So somewhere along the line it could be very beneficial to be poor on paper.

Or are we going to blame these people for corruption while the (ultra) rich are doing this constantly?

"It's good to be the king!" (Mel Brooks)

> The missing tax income has to come from the middle class, who can't avoid it.

Taxes on labor are actually a method of extracting money form the rich capital owners.

As you mentioned it's easy for the rich people to hide their wealth and avoid taxes on its growth.

The one thing that was very hard for them to avoid or hide was purchasing labor which they had to do to enlarge their wealth. So governments taxed that.

If governments lowered the taxes on labor it wouldn't mean middle class would earn more. It would only result in capital owners paying less for work. They always pay as little as possible and how little a person is willing to work for is the same, tax or no tax. Because money in hand is what counts.

Of course since as labor is being replaced with automation this way of collecting tax on capital growth becomes less and less feasible, so things are bound to change.

It's actually trivial. AI apis are pretty streamlined by now. Just slap a tax on processed tokens and you're guaranteed to reach every AI agent out there. It already happens everywhere with sales tax for normal products. Just treat tokens as the product and create an extra tax for it.

Not only that, do you tax AI that doesn’t replace humans? How can you tell? Do you tax differently depending on how many workers it replaces? How do you measure that? Do you create exemptions for non-profit or humanitarian use? How do you measure that?

I can only image the Kafkaesque tax code the government would come up with. Then it would create all sorts of weird incentives as companies attempt to minimize tax paid.

Don't people give pretty much exactly this argument about all taxes?

> maybe these robots don’t last that long

Landfills full of broken robots is totally something humans would do haha

Or people starve?

But ok look at it this way... What is silly about taxing a sector that is undertaxed because the current system assumed income taxes?

- social security

- healthcare

- armed forces

- road/utility maintenance

bacially everything funded by taxes

Or...infrastructure, public services and schools go unmaintained? How about the magic technology supposedly allowing for all of this efficency, all the while it imagines a human has six fingers, who will maintain that?

Also, if magical robot AI makes private operations more efficient, requiring less cost for the same or more amount, then it can do the same thing for government operations.

> You're transported into a world in which efficiencies mean that much fewer people need to work,

It's a matter of perspective. I'm pretty sure that from their perspective those people very much need to work because they need to pay taxes, rent, insurance, food etc...

What mechanism is going to ensure that the increased productivity is going to result in lower cost of living for these people such that they no longer require to spend so much of their life working to survive?

Yeah absolutely, and they shouldn't be taxed extra specifically for using a new technology. If people need a UBI they should be paid it off the back of all taxes (which should rise if automation is successful), not a specific automation tax. Saving jobs sounds good and it's an easy win but you end up with a stagnant economy where people are paid sinecures to do make-work, which is doubly harmful since the company has to pay extra for the employee, who is also deprived of being able to do some other job that would be useful to the economy.

They already have, significantly, around 25-35% in developed economies. The issue is that people often look at revenue, seeing company X earning $100 billion annually, and assume they should pay $20 billion in taxes. However, most AI companies today are not profitable and spend up to 100% more than their revenue on R&D and product development. I doubt they will turn a profit anytime soon, probably not for at least a decade.

They already are

You tax where you can not where you should. Corporations trivially hide profits. What they couldn't hide well was labor. You know what else they can't hide? Their power bill. It even works for companies that eternally operate "at loss" (which also parallels taxing labor).

> Corporations should be taxed on their profits

Hold on now, how will 'trickle-down' economics work then ? Think of the poor companies trying to provide a living for all those AI. /s

Just to expand on this. The wheelbarrow increases the value of labor. It's not a good analogy.

Wheelbarrows are pretty simple devices, I’m sure many people just made them on their own. But even accepting this point, there’s no particular reason why we should expect that every invention until now generated new and different types of work, just not this one. The people talking about complete displacement are selling you a story because it gets them clicks and sells books.

you think when the wheel barrow was invented it was obvious that new jobs would be created?!?

The problem is that thousands of sub-stackers, journalists, and "thought leaders" have realized they can make a living writing a weekly think piece speculating that AI will take jobs.

Sadly not unique in human history.

What about the wheel then? It's stolen plenty of jobs, not only from people, but from animals too.

Industrialization did replace 90% of people's jobs. And the only thing that happened was that people got new jobs to do.

A lot of them are bullshit jobs though. We've yet to see "AI" do anything actually beneficial. I don't mean the stuff that was done before the AI hype like categorizing bacteria, etc.

Watch the news. One crisis after another, so maybe that freed up work force and the wealth generated by "AI" should be used to tackle at least one of them.

Huge amounts of taxes and dedication of that money could be a first step.

Alternatively don't raise taxes and use the oh so great AI to tackle these issues. Should be trivial if you have ">90%" of all work freed up.

Indeed, there’s nothing illogical about adjusting tax rates and structures as things change.

I am deeply sceptical of the idea that 99% of us are suddenly going to be idle any day now, so I think endless think pieces on what we should do when that day arrives are kind of pointless. But it is certainly obvious that if it did happen, we would have to reassess how we do stuff.

This is utterly backwards and your false statement leads to a completely wrong set of inferences.

We don't let corporations do anything because they provide value through jobs and taxes. What company do you know that exists (beyond transiently) solely by paying taxes and employing people?

Companies are an extension of the individual, they exist to make money for the individuals that own them so that those individuals can acquire goods and services that they themselves need or desire.

How do companies make this money? Holding people at gun point and taking it is generally illegal; instead they resort to providing goods or services to some set of people who are willing to pay for them.

To provide these goods or services they need to employ people. The fewer people companies in aggregate can employ, the better for people in aggregate since those people can acquire "things" (food, jewellery, phones,...) for less of their own labour (or equivalent dollars).

If the "benefits dry up" as you say, people will stop sending their hard earned money to this company and the company will eventually cease to exist. Your fallacy was assuming the benefits were the jobs and taxes, not the goods and services provided.

1. No, we are not losing. 2. If it was true that we were losing, then tax revenue would be the least of our worries.

Sure doesn't feel like it. Life's never been better for more people.

Agreed. Essentially it's either you create jobs directly, or you contribute to the UBI fund.

As long as they start with the titular character that's a fair end to the species

Chances are half of humans would vote for it too

Amazon didn’t pay zero taxes, robbing the commons. Amazon engaged in trade and investment, taxed on all sides and at multiple points in the exchange of goods and services. Then Amazon invested their profits into further tax-creating transactions, reducing their tax burden that year.

When Amazon stopped investing and started extracting those profits everyone paid taxes on that giant money pile that wouldn’t exist without the investment. Every Amazon worker, CEO included, paid taxes all along. Amazon’s service providers and partners did. Amazon now does too, and the tax coffers have won big.

Taxation offsets from investments should be broadened (to individuals), not shamed.

...creating a huge amount of value for customers and shareholders, and now pays far more tax on far more profit.

Just distribute the fruits of the automated labor.

The robots and automations are like the trees and bushes from our gatherer's past.

People would just take what they needed. No one would say: you are not allowed to take a berry from this bush because it's mine!!!

We could just make more robots instead. If the robots are building robots then there's no barrier there.

Why is the utopia predicated on less people?

Amazon website is equivalent to 100 million cloned sales people who work at retail shops. It didn't cause global unemployment.

And where did the farmers go? The children of farmers were absorbed into jobs that were created for automating the farming and other industrial work. Farm automation did not cause unemployment overall.

I did mean "all jobs across the entire economy"

Uncontrolled capitalism hasn't worked either. Controlled capitalism brought us were we are today: Huge inequality around the globe especially in 3th world countries like the USA and destruction of the whole ecosystem we live in.

Communism didn't look great next to capitalism (east europe vs. west europe) but those people were also happy.

My idea is not communism though, its a 'if you do beneficial things for society, we have resources for it'. If you are teaching kids, we the planet have resources for you.

If you take care of kids, we the planet, have resources for you.

Lets call it Civic Duty Dividend or Care Standard or Public Service Money.

> 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.

That would be extremely complicated. And would of course be corrupted to the core by all kinds of different parties seeking to benefit from it.

Governments can print money.

But yes, you're right, the core problem is that in the USA, people need to justify their existence through labor. If they can't labor, they can't justify their existence (barring the slim few outliers on benefits, who are constantly under attack for being lazy or whatever).

However, if we take a step back and just consider reality for itself, we're just talking about resource allocation. Under the current system, the allocation of resources is dependent upon how much cash any given person can command, which is ostensibly connected to the value of their labor, but in reality, is clumpy and is connected first and foremost to how much cash they or their family historically had, and secondarily how valuable their labor is to capitalism, rather than to humanity. Thus investment bankers make 9x what teachers and EMTs make.

There's no reason we need to play that game. We can simply allocate the resources along more efficient terms, such as, taking the robot-harvested food, having robots put it in self driving trains and trucks, and having it delivered to people who need food.

Imminent or not, what jobs will remain? Fixing the robots? Technology strives to reduce cost, labor is typically the largest cost, so is it not inevitable that labor will be made mostly redundant?

I understand the need to seed future debates early.

My hesitation comes from the fact that most proposals implicitly assume a “fixed physical capability” for AI systems — something we don’t actually have yet.

In practice, social impact won’t be determined by abstractions but by power budgets, GPU throughput, reliability of autonomous systems, and years of real-world operation.

If scaling hits physical or economic limits, the eventual policy debate may look more like progressive taxation on high-wattage compute or specialized hardware than anything being discussed today.

And if fully automated systems ever run safely for several consecutive years, that would still be early enough for the Overton window to shift.

I’m not dismissing long-term thinking.

I’m pointing out the opportunity cost: attention spent on hypothetical futures tends to displace attention from problems that exist right now. That tradeoff rarely appears in the discussion.

So for me it’s just a question of balance — how much time we allocate to tomorrow’s world versus today’s neighborhood.

From my own vantage point, the future talk feels disproportionately dominant, so the T-1000 analogy came naturally.

> A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.

— IBM Training Manual, 1979

Aren't "public services, facilities and infrastructure" provided by government?

I think I am fine with taking an approach to that that is just brutally tilted against large values and brutally tilted in favor of transparency. So like, you can't do anything with your ownership share in that privately-held company --- can't use it as collateral for a loan, can't present it to investors to get more funding, can't trade it, can't sell it, can't in any way derive any benefit from it --- without committing yourself to a valuation and paying a tax on the increase in the valuation since the last such assessment. Also you can have a "sound dues"-like system where committing yourself to such a valuation also gives the government the right to immediately compel you to sell them the asset at your valuation. Any inaccuracies or procedural missteps in these calculations will incur minimal penalties until the amounts in question rise above a threshold (maybe like $50 million), at which point attempts to conceal or misrepresent the value of an asset is punishable by an increasing share of the asset, scaling up eventually to total forfeiture. All in all it should be excruciatingly painful to accumulate anything approaching the large wealth holdings we have today. Most of the large privately-held companies simply should not exist with the opaque valuations they have today. Either open the books completely, or lose everything.

I cannot refute your response, sir.

OTOH, I don't more than partially agree.

We can stipulate that some kind of mathematical perfection is unattainable, sure. The discussion might then move to the feedback loops that detect the state of the State and offer stabilizing input.

I don’t have a formula, but in Italy for example it would be 24% of their profit.

That’s just fantasy in your head. But even that fantasy world be better than paying 82% of your gross salary like you do in France. I would still be 32% in the positive that way.

We have "disappeared" ~97% of jobs since the Industrial Revolution started, and no increased unemployment has materialized.

Until you understand how something that counter intuitive happened, you should not speculate on how AI replacing current jobs will play out!

We don't need taxes to pay a UBI.

If "every country" is in debt, who owns the debt exactly? ... (it's not real debt)

Value isn’t something society measures or adds up by people’s bank balances; it’s just how much each individual personally wants something, and markets show this only through voluntary choices, not by declaring rich people’s gains more important than poor people’s lives.

Roads should be (and are in many places) paid for with fuel excise taxes only. The more you drive, the more you pay.

Fuel excise taxes (roads) and property taxes (local stuff)