Of course it should. An industry run by AI, still needs roads and other public goods. Furthermore, the taxes can go towards UBI, allowing people to help guide the economy with their dollars and to ensure their personal wellbeing.
The big question is when do we remove human CEOs, and use their incomes for the common good?
The answer to this post, and almost everything, is to tax the wealthy.
AI is not ruining anything. The people in control of it are.
The answer to this post, and almost everything, is to tax the wealthy. AI is not ruining anything. The people in control of it are.
This is the correct take, right here. Per the article, ““The trend toward automation and AI could lead to a decrease in tax revenues. In the United States, for example, about 85% of federal tax revenue comes from labor income, says Sanjay Patnaik, director of the Center for Regulation and Markets at the Brookings Institution,” It’s the working plebs that are carrying the majority of the tax burden.
The rich can pay there fair share, or we can grind them up and feed the slush into a reverse osmosis machine during the water wars.
AI. Is huge capital investments. Just tax the wealth. Any fortune over 10 million has to pay 4% of the gross total per year.
If you have a robot vacuum, should you pay it minimum wage? I think this is what the argument you bring up
How is paying a robot money in any way equivalent to paying a government to maintain society?
It’s definitely written by a modern journalist.
The less-sensational approach would be to ask if the companies using AI should have their taxes raised.
Should companies using computers in general pay a tax for it, a computer used to mean a human that calculated - computed - things by hand, after all?
But alarm clocks replaced knockeruppers, light bulbs replaced lamplighters, cars replaced coachmen, industrial robots replaced blacksmiths, we have no elevator operators, phone switch boards, traffic conductors, pin boys, link boys, ice cutters, scribes - the list of jobs made obsolete by technology during human history is massive.Generative AI, while widespread and disruptive, is just one more to the long list.
AI companies: “no”
This is a moronic take. Do we also tax tools when they make a 4 person job a 1/2 person job? This is just an ass backwards way of approaching the wealth inequality and poor working conditions issues by focusing on a tool instead of the system itself.
I mean, we easily could.
I pay property tax on my business tools.
So you just extend that concept. I don’t see why not.
ok apparently we do in fact tax tools. And I can see how AI, being on the cloud, might not normally fall under computer equipment or other things that would be taxed, thus needing it to be specifically included in tax law. Fuck me on that one.
I’ll give you that.
BUT
I still stand by this being a bandaid to a much larger problem concerning capitalists exploiting the labor of many and not being required to give everyone fair pay/equity. The inequality between the workforce and the ownership class is the problem. Them using AI is just their current tool of oppression, but not their only.
We need to address the root cause and directly tax the billionaires. And remove stock backed loans or at least realize their gains and tax them whenever they do use them as collateral for a loan. Shouldnt be able to claim unrealized gains and use it for collateral at the same time.
Remember, in USA companies are people, so they bribe the government with donations just like people, also money is free speech.
If they are people, they should pay taxes, why not? I say DO IT
I hate that so much. Being “people” they can essentially “out-compete” actual people in the political process. It’s very much “anything you can do I can do better”. That’s why any solution has to target them directly.
And the companies can exist for centuries, acquiring all of that enormous wealth, and “donate” a tiny sliver of it to politicians and watch them fight over the scraps.
I wish we treated corporate crimes as personal crimes committed by the CEO. If they want the cover of personhood, then they get everything that comes with that. See how fast they want to return to being corporations. As it is now, they get the best of both worlds as it suits them.
Yeah, that would be great. Unfortunately, our government is working for them now. This is gonna get weird
AI is ruining our climate, RAM prices, HDD prices qnd more. They should pay a lil extranfor that
climate being ruined long before ai, and the PC hardware is just suppliers being allowed to price-gouge people.
This is a moronic take.
It’s just a capital gains tax
When computers replaced people are computers paying taxes.
Tax wealth, not work
Tax productivity, not work. Worker productivity has skyrocketed in the past few decades, but taxes have remained constant. So the rich have been able to extract increasing amounts of productivity, while paying proportionally less and less in taxes. Meanwhile, worker wages have remained stagnant, meaning their productivity has gone up but they’re still being paid (and taxed) the same.
Wealth taxes should still absolutely be a thing, but they should be entirely divorced from a work (productivity) tax.
Tax wealth.
That sounds great, but how would you objectively quantify productivity
How much did a company spend to product the widget?
How much is the widget worth?
The difference of those two is productivity
Tax land in particular. Can’t hide land easily from tax office.
No, but the companies using it should.
And those hosting it.
Companies:
I’m honestly fine with companies not paying taxes so long as their profits are being spent on people in lower tax brackets.
Current tax structure makes it easy for the company to just give all their profits to their executives.
70% tax on income over $1 million. Go back to a progressive tax structure for company profits. Not sure why my local donut shop is paying the same rate as Microsoft.
Why should AI have to pay taxes when we have an ever increasing pool of poors, thanks in large part to AI taking their jobs, to increase the taxes on… in order to fund AI and to give tax breaks to the trillionaires?
and because there is inevitably going to be someone who fails to understand sarcasm, the heaviest of /s
AI will have wage?
good luck, churches don’t even pay taxes
But they’re charities that are not for profit…
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA … AAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Because AI is a disruptive technology we should require 40% of gross profits be put into a fund to address its negative externalities.
Joke’s on you.
They don’t actually make any money. Not unless their a monopoly that’s captured regulators anyway.
Gross profits, that way they are even more fucked. Can’t make it profitable? I guess it wasn’t meant to be.
You mean gross revenue?
That would be even more brutal, but sure I could agree to that. Then you could talk them down to gross profit so they feel like they are getting something.
Externalities? I thought Trump was getting rid of those? ;)
Better yet: nationalize the AI companies. Make AI like water supply or fire service - a public utility. My government is VERY far from perfect, but even a country with any semblance of democracy has a better chance of making AI safe and useful to all than a greedy corporation. That way the training data and model parameters can be opened to public scrutiny.
I definitely want my complete incorruptible government to be in charge of the training and maintenance of the national knowledge repository, this sounds like a great idea with no chance of negative results.
At least Google just wants to steal and sell your data. Trump actively wants you to suffer.
It needs a 900% tarrif on all good. That will surely fix the economy
More tariffs! Lol
AI shouldn’t pay taxes, but the companies making them should
Not an expert at all, but I think to an extent this already happens with the current system in most countries, and it would probably need to be done much more now. Not that Automation pays more taxes, but that having employees generally qualifies companies for tax breaks.
For instance, when Amazon said “we’re going to open a new HQ”, Cities and States tripped over themselves to try and give them the largest tax breaks. But that was under the assumption that the HQ would give jobs to tens of thousand of people, not to 5 data scientist and a massive, energy-hungry data center.
