[notatoad]

i see the comments here are pretty cynical about this post, and probably for good reason. especially "you might have to start taxing consumption instead of income because people won't have income anymore"

but at least a couple of these proposals seem to boil down to needing to tax the absolute crap out of the AI companies. which seems pretty obviously true, and its interesting that the ai companies are already saying that.

[varispeed]

> its interesting that the ai companies are already saying that.

This is just cheap PR to launder legitimacy and urgency. To create false equivalence between AI agent and an employee.

I think this is a sign of weakness, having seen AI rolled out in many companies where it already shows signs of being absolute disaster (like summaries changing meaning and losing important details - so tasks go in wrong direction and take time to be corrected, developers creating unprecedented amount of tech debt with their vibe coded features, massive amount of content that sound important, but it is just equivalent of spam, managers spending ours with LLM "researching" strategy feeding the FOMO and so on).

[buu700]

Personally, if I were going to publish something like this as a leader of a major AI company today, I would actually try very hard to put together a good faith proposal that I genuinely believed to be in the best interests of the public.

I can't speak to this particular proposal or the motivations behind it, but I think my approach is the smart play in the present circumstances. Why publish something brazenly self-serving that will at best be forgotten two weeks later, or at worst be added to the list of reasons a bunch of people have to hate you, when you could instead earn some goodwill as a benevolent thought leader and maybe get some academics and politicians to come out of the woodwork backing your ideas?

If the industry is successful and a particular player doesn't fall behind the competition, they're going to be making obscene amounts of money regardless. Better to have a happy and successful public that can't imagine life without you than a public in Great-Depression-like conditions that wants you dead and will only vote for politicians who campaign on banning your product.

As an aside, I'm not sold on the idea of taxes that specifically increase the cost of AI. I don't think it's wise to disincentivize AI usage or artificially inflate costs. (That would particularly hurt anyone with use cases that aren't connected to immediate profit.) If AI has the impact most of us would like it to have, the economy will become way more productive and the public will get its share of that through corporate taxes anyway. I'd rather just close tax loopholes and start laying the groundwork for a future system of distributing resources in a post-employment world.

My current preference is a guaranteed educational/training stipend for any unemployed adult who wants one, and changing the standard career advice for the next generation from "learn to code" to "learn to startup". Looking forward a decade from now, if employment as we know it is scarce, but the economy is flush with capital and automated labor is dirt cheap, it seems to me that self-employment will reemerge as the dominant career path — and anyone who can't raise funding for their business (or acquire grants for their research) will simply need to keep leveling up until they can. Maybe eventually we'll have the resources to transition to a full UBI, but in the meantime, we'd need a transitional system that could provide for the unemployed masses without incentivizing everyone else to suddenly quit jobs that were still necessary. Just my 2c.

[cudgy]

“My current preference is a guaranteed educational/training stipend for any unemployed adult who wants one, and changing the standard career advice for the next generation from "learn to code" to "learn to startup".”

I agree with this sentiment in the short term for people that have coding or startup skills already. We may need to ask ourselves at some point. Why work for a company when I can use AI to create a competitor to my employer in two months?.

However, this is not a long-term solution as not everyone can be a startup. Startups fail at a huge rate and they’re gonna fail even more and more startups and more people are competing to be startups. Startups don’t pay money until they start making a profit which could be years, so it’s not a legitimate replacement for a current position. This seems like a very, very competitive low, low cost of entry race to the bottom type of market so many of the benefits may quickly disappear.

[buu700]

I think it could be a pretty reasonable system. The idea is that universal guaranteed stipends would become the ultimate backstop: almost a UBI, but targeted at those with actual need for it while requiring something of social benefit in return. I'd imagine that under this system the average person would live off of stipends indefinitely, which is fine because acting as a redundant store of useful knowledge is valuable to society in and of itself.

If someone runs a startup that isn't providing a livable income and they don't have savings to live off of, that startup shouldn't be their full-time job. Of course startups aren't for everyone, just as coding isn't, but there are many other forms of self-employment. Even so, I'd imagine successful startups to be far more common than today in such an environment — if not by percentage, at least by absolute numbers. A world of cheap and abundant capital with engineering and physical labor available at a fraction of the cost of human employees would be an entrepreneur's dream.

[cudgy]

We are far from UBI though. It will take major league arm-twisting to get the government to take care of citizens like that. The oligarchs want it all, and it’ll take some serious work to overcome their resistance to increasing their taxes for UBI.

Also, AI may be more capable by the time we even get there if we ever do and AI may be a better entrepreneur than a human. Once that happens, look for the cost of AI to go sky high and access to it highly restricted and only available to the elite.

[danaris]

> Why publish something brazenly self-serving that will at best be forgotten two weeks later, or at worst be added to the list of reasons a bunch of people have to hate you, when you could instead earn some goodwill as a benevolent thought leader and maybe get some academics and politicians to come out of the woodwork backing your ideas?

For the same reason that the tech execs do all the other terrible things they do: because they want to own e v e r y t h i n g, and know that they can't do that by acting in good faith.

They want to be the new feudal overlords, and care much less about "goodwill" than they do about making it seem inevitable that they will be the gatekeepers of all thought and labor.

The more they can convince you, the people, and the policymakers that this "AI revolution" is real, and not just a bubble, the less likely everyone is to see through their exaggerations, misdirections, and outright lies to the fact that LLMs are not, and are never going to become, AGI. They are measurably not replacing any significant number of workers. They cannot do our jobs.

[cudgy]

AI companies are in a difficult position right now. Anthropic is taking the lead by looking like they care and are concerned about the effects of the technology that their feverishly building.

I don’t trust them. Their strategy is to say “don’t worry about all your jobs being taken by our technology. We (AI companies) are going to be taxed so much that you are going to be living a wealthy and fruitful life making meme photos and looking at AI porn. Don’t be concerned about how you’ll pay your bills. We’ll work it all out. Trust us.”

[eucyclos]

I've found large entrenched players tend to prefer slightly more than a reasonable amount of taxation and regulation in any industry; governments are easier to predict and handle than scrappy competitors.