this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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So we can sue robots but when I ask if we can tax them, and reduce human working hours, I'm the crazy one?
... No?
What would you tax exactly? Robots don't earn an income and don't inherently make a profit. You could tax a company or owner who profits off of robots and/or sells their labor.
It would have to be some sort of moderated labor cost saving tax kind of thing enforced by the government
Should we tax bulldozers because they take away jobs from people using shovels? What about farm equipment, since they take away jobs from people picking fruit by hand? What about mining equipment, because they take away jobs from people using pickaxes?
And we're just gonna let the pickaxes off without a tax?
If the machine replaced the human, yes. That's the argument being made currently.
Imagine if we simply taxed machine profits after 40 hours of work. You not only can give kickbacks to large companies, but you could also rewire profits to UBI
It's the wrong way to go about it, though. Just tax businesses' profits and close the bullshit loopholes they exploit to avoid paying them.
That too
But 40 hours of "work" is poorly defined. If you had everyone digging with spoons on your construction site, then you might need 100 people at 40 hours per week. If you have everyone shovels, you would only need 10 people at 40 hours a week. Do you want to tax shovels for "taking the job" from 90 people?
Yeah idk, I'm no expert. I just want wealth redistribution
If we think of production as costing land, labour and capital, then more efficient methods of production would likely swap labour for capital. In that case then we just tax capital growth like we're doing now (Only properly, like without the loopholes). No need to complicate it past that
I'm not sure how feasible it is but I've seen a sort of "minimum wage" for robots suggested which is paid to the government as tax.
What would be the legal argument for this? I'm not against it but I don't know how it could be argued.
Legal basis for suing a company that uses another company’s product/creations without approval seems like a fairly pretty straightforward intellectual property issue.
Legal basis for increased taxes on revenue from AI or automation in general could be created in the same way that any tax is created: through legislation. Income tax didn’t exist before, now it does. Tax breaks for mortgage interest didn’t use it exist, now it does. Levying higher taxes on companies that rely heavily on automated systems and creating a UBI out of the revenue might not exist right now, but it can, if the right people are voted in to pass the right laws.
I don’t think a UBI makes sense, for many people it will just be extra money in their pocket to spend which continues the endless inflation in prices until the gain disappears.
More efficient targeting of benefits to those who need it with that money would actually help reduce inequality
Every single example of means testing has been more expensive than just distributing the benefits to the people that ask for them.
I don’t think a UBI makes sense, for many people it will just be extra money in their pocket to spend which continues the endless inflation in prices until the gain disappears.
More efficient targeting of benefits to those who need it with that money would actually help reduce inequality
The idea is that UBI would give people time for the working class to pursue passions, spend more money, and enable more people to pursue entrepreneurship in the country. All things that in turn would benefit society and the arts.
Then UBI amount is increased (hopefully fast enough) to fight inflation
UBI would likely lead to a decrease in wages or at least a period of stagnation as it would be less important to employees. As far as I've heard long run it shouldn't hurt
It's more that UBI is just not financially possible for any country.
I live in a country with the highest tax rate on the continent and with just 20% of our population as pensioners, the situation is just getting worse and worse even though 49% of the population has a tax rate between 25 and 50% (+13% from welfare taxes). Just with this small percentage, we are spending 20% of our budget in pensions. More than any other area by at least 5% of our national budget.
If the state now had to pay an UBI to 69% of our population on top of this, the very minimum to pay off the UBI without going bankrupt would be to sell off the free healthcare and public transport in their entirety. And I'm assuming a small UBI of 500€/month (Not even enough to rent a 1 room appartement with utilities in some areas).
UBI would destroy any country's budget for what? Landlord increasing rent to match the UBI, corporations increasing prices to match the inflation and people wasting that money when it could have been put to use to increase renewable energy production, improve education, ...
UBI is only a good idea in paper and you only need to look at the public expenses of most European countries + have a basic understanding of capitalist greed to see it.
I'm no expert on law but maybe something about AI unethically taking our jobs away
Universal base income + AI/robots taking care of all necessary jobs sounds great
Thats exactly what Andrew Yangs political platform was. I hope he runs again
I wrote him in and probably will again
I don't know if he's running for president, but in case you're unaware he founded a new political party, the Forward Party. It's the first time I've really believed in anything political; it might not resonate with you but it's worth looking into if you haven't.
Oh I had no idea. Damn he's not in the dem ticket? I thought he would be great arguing AI talking points on stage against all the boomers on the left, guess he's done with the sham of centrist politics tho, can't blame him really
The issue with Yang is that he's proposing cutting other social safety nets and replacing them with UBI which would put a lot of people in worse situations. UBI would be great but we also need robust social programs.
I've been reliant on social programs and found them severely lacking. They're bureaucracy at their worst, and I'm lucky to be able to navigate through it - it seems those who need the help the most are the least able to receive it. They're wasteful too, I would rather the funds go directly to people who need it rather than feeding the middleman.
China didn't take your job and neither will AI. Corporations will replace you for something that cost less.
We can't really legislate against AI because other countries won't. Its also a huge boon for society, we just have to make sure the profits are redistributed and work hours overall are reduced instead of all the productivity gain going into the pockets of the mega wealthy
I’m not sure that people want to legislate against AI as much as they want to find a way to legislate for the fair outcomes associated with AI productivity. The challenge is that is harder to do. In the USA we can’t get out of our own way to properly tax corporations, nevermind have a more complex solution like reduce worker hours, increase PTO based upon improved societal output. In the absence of a complex but comprehensive solution (which I don’t think we have the capability to pull off) people are desperate and saying things like “let’s hold back on AI will we can put together this mythical great plan”. We’re never going to get the great plan though. Hopefully I’m just cynical but I don’t see a path (at least for the US as I can’t speak for the rest of the world) that doesn’t continue towards dystopia.
What makes it unethical? How is it different from advancements in technology taking away any other job, like elevator operators, numerous factory positions, calculators (the human kind), telephone operators, people who sew clothes (somewhat), and so on?
It seems to me that automating away jobs has historically bettered humanity. Why would we want a job to be done by a person when we can have a machine do it (assuming a machine does equal or better)? We can better focus people on other jobs and eventually, hopefully, with no mandatory need for a job at all.
Lol, as if. Look at wages:productivity since the 70s
Well, this "eventually" thing wouldn't be until we can automate away so many jobs that we simply couldn't (meaningfully) employ a significant chunk of people. We're not there yet. Though we shouldn't wait till we reach that point to get some form of UBI available. It's at that point where UBI would be critical and needs to be at a living wage level.
It could be argued that when our tax code, laws, and constitution were created there weren't AIs taking jobs and funneling the economy to only a few people breaking the system and it's time for us to adapt as a society. But I know adapting isn't a strength of our legal system.
Also, you wouldn't be suing the AI as it's own entity. You would be suing the creator/owner that is allowing it to steal people's content. AI is not to the point it is sentient and responsible for it's own actions.
That's actually a great argument: an AI is trained without permission on the result of people's labor, and is thus able to intercept the need for this labor and take away financial opportunities derived thereof. Therefore, An AI's labor and its profit could be argued to contain, in the percentage that an AI is the content of its training, a portion that is proportionately belonging to those who did this labor its obscure process is based on. Therefore, an AI's master should take a portion of its revenue as royalties and distribute them to the "people's council" which in this case is just the government, for it to redistributed accordingly.
i.e. tax the fuck out of the owners, and minimum basic income for all. Completing the economic circle of life.