[fny]

> A.I. is built on our collective intelligence: our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images and ideas spanning generations

I know many here would scoff at nationalizing a private company, but AI is a usurpation of human knowledge and quite literally at times. (Every AI company was embroiled in copyright lawsuits and lord knows what Qwen et al are up to.)

In turn, everyone knows labor displacement is coming. My bet is the next recession will end up being brutal for this reason. To me, labor displacement and the social consequences are a potentially *catastrophic* negative externality. Should not there be a tax to offset the "frictional" unemployment? What happens when people lose a high skill job and will no longer be able to afford their mortgage?

Also, why are people always talking about AI as if its an angel or satan? The degree to which we're doomed is an open question, much like a tornado... so why aren't we thinking about taxes on AI like a tornado insurance fund?

[pessimizer]

> Should not there be a tax to offset the "frictional" unemployment?

Absolutely not. That's like taxing shovels because people were digging with their hands. The result is just more people having to dig with their hands, the fact that 7/8ths of people who now dig with their hands will starve because shovels have been introduced is a choice that we are making. We are choosing not to feed them.

Creating an unnecessary pretense so that they can suffer before they are fed is psychotic. Pay them to go to school or to show up to healthcare appointments, not to do work that can be automated away.

[ethbr1]

> the fact that 7/8ths of people who now dig with their hands will starve because shovels have been introduced is a choice that we are making. We are choosing not to feed them

The unfortunate truth of western economic history is that capital does not willingly share its profits unless forced to (by government or labor).

The core point here is about power.

Assuming AI takes off and automates large sections of the economy, who gets to have control over those entities?

It seems a bit premature to identify the current major AI labs as inevitably being the ones to benefit.

But I am sympathetic to the idea that having the public as a (mostly) silent partner, both in profits and control, is prudent.

Where it gets dangerous is how "the public's" equity share is represented and by whom.

F.ex. I'd be vociferously opposed to the current kleptomaniacal US administration being able to wield 50% control

[brianwawok]

> In turn, everyone knows labor displacement is coming

What % of Americans would agree to that. 10%?

I agree for those of us in the field, we are a lot more confident. But I dont think my retired parents have any idea what AI is or have ever touched anything more complicated than Alexia.

[somenameforme]

That's, in large part, because tech is the field most likely to face labor disruption. Most jobs in the US are service, labor, and other such fields where LLMs will have relatively little impact.

Tech will also probably come under attack from two directions. It's not only from labor replacement, but also from a decrease in the value of tech. Right now competition in tech is limited by the relatively large barrier to entry to writing even simple programs. As that barrier disappears, the baseline value of tech will likely decline sharply.

[mikewarot]

If employment as a whole is impacted 10%, those people end up seeking work elsewhere, and driving down wages there. It's impossible for this not to effect everyone.

[jmyeet]

The impacts of AI amplify the system we live in. We live in a society that is quite happy to let people starve on the street and die to protect home values. We're bouldering towards minting trillionaires at the same time as people are struggling to afford rent and having enough food to eat where they're one bad event from being homeless.

I agree that labor displacement (and wage suppression) is in fact the only AI product. IN a just society, automation (more generally than AI) would allow people to work less. But we all know that it just means further wealth concentration and inequality.

And as material conditions worsen, society will increasingly rip itself apart. Populism will lead people to blame various out-groups for their woes because there'll be no opposition to it. It's why in the year of our Lord 2026, we have concentration camps again. Some call that term hyperbolic given the association with the HOlocaust. These people don't know history. Concentration camps were originally deportation camps [1].

I keep bringing up municipal broadband as an example of how people who hate "communism" both like their output and it's always better than national ISPs. And you know who else believes in public ownership? The US Department of Defense [2].

[1]: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/deportatio...

[2]: https://investorplace.com/dailylive/2026/06/the-pentagon-is-...

[giancarlostoro]

I would rather we have an alternative where you can buy Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, etc stock but it has a few strict requirements:

* Investors are committing to keeping their money over a 10 year period, and you pay them dividends

* At the end of the 10 years you can withdraw it all, or keep your stock but withdraw the dividends, or keep your stock and reinvest the dividends for the next 10 years.

* Companies cannot be on any other type of "stock market"

* Companies need to be identified as producing something of significant value, like SpaceX's rockets would qualify.

* It can be part of anyone's 401k since these companies would be scrutinized.

Ideally a social media only company would NEVER qualify. I think the stock market is too happy to buy and sell, when some of these companies are a long term investment that has slowly paid off in ways most people cannot fathom or comprehend including healthcare discoveries.

[yread]

To buy stocks you need savings. 24% of Americans don't have any. Your scheme wouldn't benefit them. Or am I misreading it?

[giancarlostoro]

I wouldn't block any 401k plans from purchasing these stocks which would open those up to those safer dividend returns. The maintenance cost would be drastically lowered too since you're not buying and selling these so frequently.

[jmyeet]

How is this not just a "rich gets richer" scenario? What of the majority of the population that don't have excess funds to invest?

The funny thing about AI is that the LLMs were trained by stomping on private property rights, being the intellectual rights holders of songs, books, movies, etc plus the troves of user-generated content, something for which they see no benefit.

Why are private property rights so important for AI companies but the private property rights of the training data aren't important at all?

I can tell you why: people on HN aren't authors or musicians. They are however software engineers who see themselves as profiting from the AI bubble.

Put another way: it's not that they care about private property rights. They simply think they can get rich enough so the problems won't apply to them.

[fhdkweig]

You can tax something without owning it. It is the owning part that bothers me. It implies that the government is going to shovel ridiculous amounts of money into these things and when the bubble finally pops We The People get nothing out of it.

[triceratops]

I think you've misunderstood the proposal. The government levies a tax in the form of shares, not cash. It doesn't pay for the shares.

FTA: "It would create a sovereign wealth fund through a one-time 50 percent tax — not on the profits of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and other companies, but paid with something far more valuable than that: the stock."

[AnthonyMouse]

That seems like it would be pushing pretty hard against the Takings clause. Federal wealth taxes in general are rather precarious in the US because the 16th amendment allows taxing income, not assets.

[jcranmer]

Strictly speaking, that's not accurate.

Article 1, Section 8 has the general taxation clause:

> The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

but Section 9 has the apportionment clause:

> No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.

The term "direct tax" isn't fully explained, but it's generally been held that taxes on property (including wealth) would classify as a direct tax. Congress imposed an income tax, but SCOTUS said in Pollock v Farmer's Loan & Trust Co that a tax on rental income is effectively a property tax, and so must be apportioned.

The 16th Amendment was enacted specifically to overrule the Pollock decision, and allowed for income taxes to not have to be apportioned. In many respects, it's probably unnecessary because even without it, it's probably fairly likely that Pollock would have been overruled as just being bonkers reasoning anyways.

[AnthonyMouse]

I'm not sure which part you're calling inaccurate. The 16th amendment:

> The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

Allows taxes on incomes (but not wealth) without apportionment.

According to your own post:

> it's generally been held that taxes on property (including wealth) would classify as a direct tax.

Implying that unlike income under the 16th amendment, a federal tax on wealth would have to be apportioned. But apportionment isn't something people are likely to accept in that context because then you can't put the screws to people in New York or Texas without extracting the same amount per capita from the people in New Mexico or Arkansas.

> In many respects, it's probably unnecessary because even without it, it's probably fairly likely that Pollock would have been overruled as just being bonkers reasoning anyways.

Unclear how that reasoning could be bonkers without Wickard v. Filburn being even worse, since the logic is pretty similar. The 16th amendment itself had exactly the result apportionment was intended to prevent, i.e. states with structural political advantages (swing states, lower population states with more US Senators per capita) quickly set up massive federal transfers to themselves at the expense of other states.

[triceratops]

How are property taxes legal?

[AnthonyMouse]

There is no federal property tax, and even state property taxes are collected in dollars rather than shares of ownership and as a small recurring percentage rather than a one-time taking of what amounts to a controlling interest.

[triceratops]

Thanks for the clarification.

[dylan604]

That sounds like a brilliant idea if you're a board member of one of these companies.

[vrganj]

Who said anything about the government shoveling in money?

[fhdkweig]

Usually to "own" something requires to spend money to get it.

[triceratops]

The government gets half my paycheck without buying it from me.

[grim_io]

Really? Poor Elon must be going bankrupt any time now, seeing how much of Tesla and SpaceX he owns.

[vrganj]

... or force.

[exe34]

Wait, is the idea to buy that 50%?

[fhdkweig]

I don't know what their plan is, but that is one way to "own half". I'm really hoping that isn't their plan, but this administration seems to love shoveling tax money to people who don't deserve it.

[wasabi991011]

> I don't know what their plan

The plan Bernie Sanders is proposing is clearly stated in TFA, which is to take 50% of shares as a one-time tax, not as a purchase.

[wasabi991011]

No, it isn't, it's to take 50% as a tax, as stated in TFA.

[exe34]

Yeah that's more sensible.

[fny]

Taxing X% ownership means you get X%. You don't pay for it. So if the bubble pops, you still get X% ownership. To your point, it may be smarter to tax the IPO valuation and buy more later.

[fhdkweig]

I'm mostly commenting on the story a few days ago regarding having index funds change their rules to automatically purchase shares in the impending IPOs so that passive investors would end up buying shares without their direct knowledge. It struck me as a way for executives to cash out of what they know is a bubble. A lot of people in that thread didn't seem to have any issue with that.

[nradov]

Labor displacement is always coming. Every new technology eliminates some old occupations and creates new ones. LLMs aren't unique in that regard. We should have a safety net to support and retrain displaced workers regardless of the technology.

And let's please not have any lazy, low-effort replies claiming that AI will somehow magically eliminate all jobs for humans.

[pesus]

What are the jobs AI is creating, specifically?

> And let's please not have any lazy, low-effort replies claiming that AI will somehow magically eliminate all jobs for humans.

I don't think AI actually capable of doing so, but AI companies need to stop bragging about wanting to do this and making it their goal if you don't want people to keep bringing it up.

[metalspot]

AI accelerates the entire white collar economy and makes it more efficient. It has and will continue to result in large job gains for blue collar and service workers. The people getting rich off AI have to spend their money somewhere.

[pesus]

> It has and will continue to result in large job gains for blue collar and service workers.

Source? Specifics? This doesn't even sound plausible at face value. Even if it is somehow true, higher paying white collar jobs being replaced with service jobs that pay far less and have way worse conditions is not a positive or even a neutral outcome.

> The people getting rich off AI have to spend their money somewhere.

The amount of wealth hoarding already going on says otherwise. Buying yachts and islands does not magically offset millions of jobs being lost.

[VikingCoder]

> The people getting rich off AI have to spend their money somewhere.

That's demonstrably false.

If it were remotely true, trickle down economics would have been a gold rush for the entire economy.

[amanaplanacanal]

Not sure how generating exponentially more boilerplate is going to make anything more efficient. I guess we'll find out.

[nradov]

There are lots of new jobs in building data centers, plus all the components that go into those. For example, worldwide employee count at Amphenol is way up over the past couple years. They make a lot of electrical connectors and similar items.

[pesus]

Temporary construction and manufacturing jobs are not actual replacements for the jobs lost. They'll be done after the data centers are built, and then we're just back to AI having destroyed tons of jobs with no replacements.

[nradov]

Construction is never "done". New stuff is always being built. And eventually the old data centers will be demolished or remodeled, which also takes a huge amount of labor.

I think a lot of HN users still somehow don't understand the "lump of labor" fallacy.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/page-one-economics/2...

[pesus]

Construction is in fact done at some point. You cannot build an unlimited amount of anything, let alone data centers.

Do you honestly believe there will be enough constant construction on data centers to replace millions of jobs lost to AI? Even if that was somehow true, there are tons of people that are not capable for one reason or another (age, physical fitness, etc) of doing construction work. Construction work also pays significantly less than many of the jobs being lost as is, so it's not a good replacement in that regard. And what happens when construction gets further streamlined and/or automated and requires fewer people? Or none at all, in the future?

Even your most optimistic hypothetical scenario results in millions of people doing hard manual labor for poverty wages. If anything, this just strengthens the case against AI and AI companies.

[rainsford]

I like to think I'm generally more optimistic than average that AI growth will be a a net benefit to the economy, standard of living, and employment, but "AI creates jobs building AI data centers" is a terrible argument in favor of that optimistic idea.

Ignoring the fact that the number of data center construction jobs a given data center produces is probably vastly lower than the labor displacement possible with the compute power said data center will hold, the idea of losing your job due to AI only to get another job building data centers for more AI is some genuinely dystopian stuff.

I feel like AI would be a lot more popular if the proponents of building AI hadn't seem to have all gone to the Darth Vader school of PR. AI is a valuable tool because it allows skilled labor to be vastly more productive, not because it displaces skilled labor into jobs where they build they build the infrastructure for the robotic overlords that replaced them.

[ryan_n]

> And let's please not have any lazy, low-effort replies claiming that AI will somehow magically eliminate all jobs for humans.

This is essentially what a handful of c-suite execs have been telling the world for the past 2-3 years is it not?

[unethical_ban]

It seems obvious to me that AI will drastically reshape creative industries, and greatly lower the headcount required for analytical and programming industries, in the long term. The scope of its impact on the economy is likely greater than the Internet, social media, and the telephone.

Furthermore, AI companies and consulting companies themselves are selling this idea that it will completely reshape employment.

I find it more hand-wavey to say "it's just another technology change" than it is to say "this time it's different".

[nradov]

There is essentially infinite demand for software. Every time new technologies have made it cheaper to build software we've ended up with more new software, and more people employed in software development. There's no reason to expect that LLMs will change that historical pattern. We'll just be using higher level tools.

But most of the people creating digital media like animation, graphic art, and special effects are probably screwed. The next few years are going to be tough for them and they have my sympathies, but they're only a tiny fraction of the labor force.

[customguy]

> Every new technology eliminates some old occupations and creates new ones [..] And let's please not have any lazy, low-effort replies

Yeah, a lazy, low-effort claim such as this doesn't really require replies, it can just fail to stand on its own.

[nerdyadventurer]

> I know many here would scoff at nationalizing a private company

Really? Do US public think like that, no wonder organization like IMF want to privatize national companies.