[throwaway22032]

This is just another reason to tax externalities and be done with it.

Guilt tripping on totally arbitrary things just isn't going to work.

We already have a mechanism for managing scarce resources, it's called price, so let's just use it.

[_heimdall]

How does a tax fix it? Sure the government takes in the money and could even do right about how they allocate spending it, but the damage (so to speak) is caused before the tax is ever collected.

Consumers just need to know how it actually works, at least at the most basic level of what the costs are. From there either consumers don't care or stop using it. Do we really need the government forcing more morals on us through another sin tax?

[throwaway22032]

My point is that if oil extraction, refining, burning etc is taxed then no-one has to worry about any of this.

That worrying about whether doing bog standard everyday activities like turning on a computer and running a program is "bad" is just silly and even if it did work would cause mass anxiety.

It's not a sin tax, it's a tax on causing externalities. There is no need for an AI tax because AI is not in and of itself a thing which causes environmental damage.

Well, unless it goes Skynet, but I'm considering that out of scope.

[_heimdall]

I still don't quite follow you here, how does a tax make it something that no one had to worry about? We tax fuel, for example, but people are still worried about emissions and environmental impacts.

I call it a sin tax in this case because it would be a government taxing something they don't want people doing, or want us doing less of. Where income tax isn't meant to make people want to reduce their income, taxes on alcohol, cigarettes, or in this case oil extraction or burning are specifically implemented to move the market.

[robertlagrant]

The price at use is free, so how much should we tax it?

[throwaway22032]

At source. Taxes on the sale of LNG, taxes on the production of GHG by power plants, fuel duty, potentially on activities like mining, etc.

Setting the rate is more complex, but anything at all would be a start.

[robertlagrant]

It would be a start - impossible not to be - but you might suffer adverse consequences. Either: you make other things expensive you didn't mean to, through the wrong granularity of rule, or you didn't catch people who slightly changed their position to not have the rule applied to them any more. And either case: lots of energy spent defining rules and having each company analyse whether or not its affected and then what to do about it.

[throwaway22032]

Sure.

It is still substantially more effective and easier than trying to look at literally every individual thing we do and guilt people into doing different things.

It's just not going to work, people will use AI anyway.

[robertlagrant]

I don't see why taxation is a good solution to guilt. Information is. Is Google using anything but renewables powering the AI stuff? Is this even in the top million things people do that generates pollution in some way? Until you know, why would you feel anything?