Ask HN: We tax labour, why not tax AI?

9 points | by roschdal 16 hours ago ago

6 comments

  • vpaulus 43 minutes ago ago

    Purpose of taxation is to fund something that benefits society but needs to be paid for.

    What exactly do you think AI tax incomes should be used for? Developing government funded LLMs? Providing free AI access to those who can't afford?

    Or is it simply about milking the rich?

  • dsdjung 15 hours ago ago

    I don't think we tax labour. We tax earnings.

    • Redster 15 hours ago ago

      And I'm sooo thankful we don't. As a guy who tries to save money by DIYing it in 3x-10x the time it should take, I would be broke.

    • perilunar 10 hours ago ago

      We shouldn't. We should tax land and resource use.

  • datas 15 hours ago ago

    Is labor and ai even a meaningful equivalence? I think not.

    Do you mean like humanoid?

    A actual tax on humanoids performing human jobs could just be seen as a speed limiter, and, I'm pretty sure that goes directly against everyones goals and the best interest of anyone in that position

  • reddmachine 15 hours ago ago

    I'm unclear about how exactly we tax AI. Do we do it per token? Do we tax the companies that use AI? Or provide AI? Do you tax training data brokers or training/inference compute providers? It's unclear who you want to tax.