Looking at the actual article, the people suggesting taxes on AI are American Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps, and Bill Gates, founder of MSFT. The Europeans suggest more general taxes on capital instead.
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.
The problem is that rich people and large companies usually go to great lengths to avoid taxes, use loopholes or get special deals (and with great success). The missing tax income has to come from the middle class, who can't avoid it.
With increased automation, this only gets more extreme.
> 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.
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.
Directly taxing AI is very hard. Imagine if a company had to pay taxes for every AI agent operating in the U.S. or the E.U. As if they were regular employees. Big corporations would simply move the AI agents to countries without taxes.
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.
unglaublich|2 months ago
Don't tax tools or income, tax the accumulation of it: wealth.
Terr_|2 months ago
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.
amelius|2 months ago
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!"
woile|2 months ago
estearum|2 months ago
Problem solved.
fainpul|2 months ago
With increased automation, this only gets more extreme.
scotty79|2 months ago
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.
wwweston|2 months ago
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.
b3lvedere|2 months ago
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)
savolai|2 months ago
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
useumix|2 months ago
sigmoid10|2 months ago
refurb|2 months ago
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.
tempfile|2 months ago