Bill Gates thinks we should tax robots and tokens and such since we won’t be able to tax income via payroll if AI takes our jerbs.
Relevant to the sub because it’s about tax policy and creative destruction (aka tookin er jerbs)
Posted by hypsignathus
4 Comments
>Bill Gates thinks we should tax robots and tokens and such since we won’t be able to tax income via payroll if AI takes our jerbs
I dont see a world where this happens in a meaningful way. Companies will have too much power and governments too little. Especially when said taxes would be needed to support unemployable meatbags.
We either transition to post-scarcity, or we get terminator’d imo
How would the mechanics of this work? I can see taxing calls to US based system, Claude and OpenAI, but wouldn’t that create as push to (Chinese) open models? I guess tax the hardware to run them?
And then, it would be a social security like tax that goes to everyone?
Gates has been [saying this for at least 10 years, certainly pre-llm](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nccryZOcrUg). I don’t get it. If you tax productivity improvements, they cease being productivity improvements! Like, if you taxed the steam engines that were replacing draft animals in the english coal mines, it would have made sense to keep using draft animals because there would be no savings in switching to steam.
The second thing I’d note is just basic Adam Smith. Our wealth does not come from the earnings of labor. It comes from our *productivity*. If a given technology improves productivity, that is the fountain of wealth. Many people do not think about this abstractly enough, and only try to track down flows of dollars, rather than flows of wealth.
In principle, a world where practically everything is produced without human labor is an extremely wealthy and comfortable world, not an extremely impoverished world. If you think that notion is sci-fi and silly, then you necessarily don’t need to be worried about AI causing mass unemployment because you implicitly believe human labor will remain heavily involved in the production of the things we want and need.
Why should I give a shit what this ghoul thinks? Doesn’t he need to slip his wife more STI medications?