Apart from being all AI-written:

> Reality: It’s not fear; it’s math. If 30% of the workforce is displaced, and the remaining 70% have to pay for the social safety net (or UBI) required to keep the displaced alive, the math breaks.

The argument being given simply avoids the question of where the economy itself is in all this. The workers pay taxes, the taxes pay for infrastructure, sure. But the workers aren't doing work (it got taken), so they aren't earning money, so what do they pay taxes on?

It's all just efficiency gains and everyone currently employed stays employed? Not a single AI company wants that. Not a single tech company wants that. Not only do they want layoffs, they're already happening. So that's not going to work out.

Which means there's less workers being paid, less taxes, less money to be spent on the economy, which means less money to pay workers, which means... the logical conclusion is "no economy at all". Taxes are the last thing to worry about then.

Payroll taxes are inefficient as they discourage work and increase its cost for employers, leading to lower hiring. If payroll taxes vanishes because of AI, it doesn't mean that we should stop using it to increase productivity, but rather reorient taxes.

For instance, land value tax or consumption taxes are often seen as more efficient and fair, depending on their implementation. They also are AI-proof.

> Reality: It’s not fear; it’s math. If 30% of the workforce is displaced, and the remaining 70% have to pay for the social safety net (or UBI) required to keep the displaced alive, the math breaks.

What evidence does the author have that 30% of the workforce will be displaced (not to mention unable to find another job)? The author also doesn't seem to take into account that AI is also making new jobs: https://www.economist.com/business/2025/12/14/job-apocalypse...

What a weak argument against the “it’s just a tool” defense.

<< A person was venting to a friend about being forced to use AI

I am not sure I understand the opinion piece listed, but it does have one fragment that I can confirm as happening and it is that the use is effectively being mandated. Take it as you will, but my company rolled out next year's goals. Can you take a guess as to what they contain and what people will do to accomplish those goals. Hang in tight. It is going to be a bumpy ride. And here is a thing, I actually like this tech.

AI employees are not employees. They are tools, not people.

The fallacy here is applying a closed world assumption where the amount of code doesn't change but more of it is written by AIs and sold for the same dollar amount. And therefore less taxes get paid. That assumption is wrong; and so are the conclusions and sand castles built on it.

The reality is that whenever we give programmers better tools, we get more programmers, not less. And then they start creating even more software than before. Also the value of software drops but the amount spent on software grows. That's because economies grow when you drop the cost of something and create more demand for that stuff. In this case software. Where in the past some companies might not have bothered with an app or a website or automation, many now do have some of that stuff. And now they get to raise the ambition level and maybe see if they can automate some more of their internal processes.

Most companies won't do that themselves. They'll pay others to do this for them. And those people and companies will compete with each other on who does the best job most cheaply for a given return on investment. Which is nothing new. The winners will likely be leaning heavily on AI tools to earn handsomely for solutions that deliver some kind of value. They'll want better/smarter apps, deeper integrations with stuff, more automation, a sprinkling of AI, and whatever else makes their companies run better and earn more money.

AI tools themselves are already a commodity and just a means to an end. Anyone can use them. But only some know how to use them well. The skill is in understanding how to use them, what to fix, where to apply them, etc. Those wielding them best will line up more happy customers and revenue. And then they pay their taxes. Over the value they created.

They here being companies that increase their profits, software companies that charge for helping them do that, people employed by those companies, and AI infrastructure and other suppliers that are part of the solution here. Economies grow over time. VAT, profit tax, income tax, etc.

There's a lot of work that will need to happen over the next few decades to pull a lot of this planets industries out of last century. Anyone that believes it's all going to be AIs doing that by themselves more or less unprompted is dreaming. This is going to be a lot of work that will involve a lot of investment for potentially very big returns on investment. A lot of that work wasn't happening because it was too hard or expensive. It just got cheaper, so more of it will start happening now. There's plenty left to do.

I'm going to be controversial and ask: who pays taxes in tech like they should be paid? i mean small and big corporations.

What is the world is an "AI employee"?

Economists often talk about substituting capital for labor. It's certainly common in countries, such as the US, where labor is relatively expensive.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to change the tax system to make sure there's no tax advantage to substituting capital for labor, or for that matter, labor for capital. I have no idea what changes would be needed, but there's no reason that using AI should have significant tax implications.

So "Corporate profit taxes are a game of hide-and-seek", but "you can tax the value flow, the revenue generated in-country, or the massive energy consumption of the data centers"?

The author acts as if taxes are not a completely fluid system, that will quickly adept to ensure revenue keeps flowing, squeezing wherever the squeezing is the juiciest. It does not need cautious calibration.

What if AI can greatly reduce the amount of money (i.e. tax receipts) that the government needs to function properly? What if AI can quickly determine who really qualifies for government assistance, and cuts off all the fraudsters without needing an army of bureaucrats?

We could even cut out a ton of middle-men and return congress to a part-time job. One can only dream, right?

I'm going to be controversial and ask: who pays taxes in tech?

I don't get it. How does the initial anecdote about AI being shitty and sloppy tie in to the rest of the article?

> if we increasingly describe workers as merely being “human-in-the-loop,” what is the human actually there for?

Your anecdote just answered this! Because the LLM slop output in excel wasn't good enough!

> What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life to be a hundred years hence? ... for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure ... we shall endeavour ... to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week ....

- John Maynard Keynes, 1930 [0].

Keynes was an economist whose work had an enormous impact and is still discussed and taught today. He predicted much more leisure and much less work for the future and he was wrong.

Extrapolating productivity (hours of work required to create a fixed output) into the future, it makes sense that we'll need to work a lot less to make the same stuff. The missing piece is that we end up deciding we need to make other stuff/services. We fill in our extra time making new things. We're not satisfied with what we used to have.

If AI drastically increases productivity, leading to job losses, we will just make other stuff and provide other services and fill our time with that. People will create other jobs to satisfy that demand. For reference:

1700s: 90% of US workers were farmers. early 1900s: 40%, 1970: 4%

1940s: 38% of US workers were in manufacturing/factories. 2020: ~9%

As productivity improves, we come up with other things to make or services to provide that are higher complexity or "worth more".

The products and services provided by a country are not static.

[0] https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/...

There is no credible model for UBI anywhere from AI. It's not going to be paid for by anyone, anywhere. Petrostates including Alaska can pay one, sort of, but they are not replacing people with automation, and their largesse won't last forever.

The model of capitalism is to pay for labor and avoid taxes and fees at almost all costs. AI-enabled businesses will not seek to contribute any more to UBI than they seek to contribute to any other non-employee. People who don't labor won't get money.

Cynicism about corporate accountability, regulation, oversight and legal consequences is a much larger concern than LLMs displacing people from what David Graeber would have called shitty jobs.

When I read a post that presumes that corporations are above the law and that it's a closed issue, I get sad. We can have nice things, but we must stop supporting governments that aggressively deregulate, prioritize mergers over public good, and compel their law enforcement to focus on hunting migrants instead of forcing corporations to pay taxes.

Talking about these systemic issues as though they are unsolvable because clearly corporations gonna corporation is maddening.

I don't understand why they don't jail corporate directors who are ultimately responsible for approving creative accounting tricks. If there's no penalty, of course they aren't going to do the right thing.

The greatest trick the devil can play in this era is convincing the public that their enemy is the least powerful people in society, not the most powerful.

In a consumer economy, people have to have the free cash to consume. Today, we call them workers. If they’re displaced, there’s going to be a hell of a lot of corporate taxes or trashed machines. I’d bet on the latter.

It's only a matter of time until the zero-employee unicorn becomes technically possible.

The path there looks like Uber's early playbook:

* Run the company as if AI outputs are attributable corporate acts with liability clearly sitting at the corporate entity level.

* Scale faster than attribution doctrine can be practically enforced.

* Cross the "too big to fail" line. ie: become economically and operationally indispensable.

* Force doctrinal clarification, where courts recognize AI-mediated decision systems as a basis for corporate attribution, without inventing new legal persons.

The solution is to stop taxing human labor/income and to start taxing every financial transaction, from buying a piece of candy, a computer component, a service, a house, a data center, or a share of stock, etc.

Just the volume of Equities + TRACE fixed income/structured + munis + real estate is over $200Trillion. A mere 3% tax on those would put the $6T US budget in large surplus. Add $1.7 Quadrillion of ovrerall payments and a 0.3% tax on transactions (yes, $3 per $1000) would also put the US budget in surplus.

All of it would also involve far less tracking and bureaucratic overhead, and indeed far less govt intrusion into people's lives (i.e., not digging into every source and amount of income).

As someone who was blown away when I started my own online business and underestimated what I would be responsible for with taxes I could go full libertarian and yell "TAXATION IS THEFT" from the rafters, but I'll refrain.

It was still a shock though. I thought our system / goal was to encourage individuals to pursue their dreams and be self-sufficient. If that is actually the case, then our system is broken.

Skipping the details I made enough to support myself and my wife. The government wanted around 20%-25% of that, and they do NOT like to take "I can't afford that" as an answer. Fast forward to today and with poor accounting and lack of foresight I now am working a fulltime corporate soul sucking dev job to pay back the government for the years I tried to make it work on my own.

It's the most disillusioned I've ever been with my life. I've never felt as trapped and depressed as I do right now. All because I owe the IRS a large amount of money. On the plus side we have some amazing bombers/jet fighters, and someone is getting their healthcare subsidized.

Don't worry, all. They (the madmen, er, badmen) will come up with an AI-currency (like crypto) that AIs can "pay" to the govt. as taxes, and all will be hunky-dory - for them and their masters, that is.

For the rest of us - well, life is finite, anyway. So might as well make it finito.

;)

> Reality: Tractors magnified physical labor; they didn’t simulate the mind. More importantly, the industrial revolution took decades. The AI displacement is happening in quarters.

Tractors are a tool - a force multiplier in getting work done - just like AI-based tooling is.

Self-checkout is taking away jobs from checkout clerks. Should we forbid self-checkout in order to maintain job security? It's the same argument.

Rewind the clock to the late 1800s and this same post could have been written about cars taking away jobs from horses.

Sounds like a socialist to me

The future will unironically be communism, and that's the best of possible worlds.

I stopped reading when this idiot declared that a tool that makes problems worse instead of helping is evidence of a system working as it should.

This is reasoning as cockeyed as the pigs use in Animal Farm.

We are once again wildly overstating the capabilities of LLMs. They'll cause some minor economic rearrangement in the next ten years but slightly better search isn't going to cause mass unemployment any time soon. This is just propaganda from the "AI" industry to further the perception that they've created a machine god. Wake me up when ClosedAI goes bankrupt.

The article and the entire "AI will take all our jobs" doomer moment is idiotic. No one is losing their job to AI and no one will lose their job to AI in the long term without better jobs opening up in their place, same as every single technological innovation in history.

But humoring the author for a moment, and taking their argument to the extreme - let's say AI does take the majority of jobs, and taxes on human productivity aren't enough to sustain society anymore - so what? Isn't not having to work a good thing?

"But how will we pay for things without income taxes??" Why not the same way we did so for literally thousands of years of human history before this kind of taxation was a thing? Or the same way dozens of countries with no income tax do today? Consumption taxes, property taxes, wealth taxes, more efficient extraction and use of natural resources, trade, technological innovations.

The point is, there are plenty of ways for a society to collect revenue, reallocate wealth and balance the books. We don't have to all commit to back breaking labor for ~100% of our functional life just because this is the system most of us were born into and we don't know any better.

The easiest play is for the people to own the infrastructure AI runs on, then pay for social benefits out of infrastructure rental agreements. The cloud is massively profitable, and the federal government has a real competitive advantage compared to private parties in terms of large buildouts.

ubi just doesn't make any sense. case in point is the overwhelming negative response to the laptop 4G program in NYC with the Chromebooks. virtually every comment said it makes more sense for such a thing to be means tested and it was a waste of money since most people already had internet at their house. how ironic - if that's the attitude on this forum of all places about table stakes, imagine the reaction when you give rich people thousands of dollars a year for food. ubi is DOA.

What a diarrhea take, my god. How can someone just assume finance is NOT a zero sum game? Will AI wear adidas and rent houses? Everybody lives of the sweat of somebody else. This should be true even in California

Taxation is a response to the economy. So if the economy changes, so should taxation.

Also - if corporations succeed in becoming completely independent of labor, it will happen regardless of taxation. We shouldn't say to corporations "you must hire people or else we won't have a tax base". We should say to corporations "since you no longer require humans, we will change the way taxes are applied."

A century or more ago, they could see how rapidly productivity was increasing. It's only increasing yet faster now. Economists then predicted people would have enormous leisure time. While they have significantly more, it's not like we have abandoned work. Instead those productivity benefits go increasingly to shareholders and not labor.

So we will soon face a precipice that will disrupt the status quo. And the people will eventually triumph because collectively we are the governed.