In fact, we avoid a lot of difficult moral dilemmas because we accept the systems are crappy and just a necessary evil. The closest you claim to be to perfection, the more you have to acknowledge that some moral questions are just impossible to settle to everyone's satisfaction.
Is the life of child X more important than the life of child X because of a score calculated based on their grades, parents' income, etc? The system we have today may implicitly result in such outcomes, but at least it's not intentional.
It really misses the forrest from the trees. You're transported into a world in which efficiencies mean that much fewer people need to work, but somehow government services and entitlements are unchanged and we need to hit roughly the same percent federal tax receipts or ... what exactly?
But ok look at it this way... What is silly about taxing a sector that is undertaxed because the current system assumed income taxes?
It's a matter of perspective. I'm pretty sure that from their perspective those people very much need to work because they need to pay taxes, rent, insurance, food etc...
What mechanism is going to ensure that the increased productivity is going to result in lower cost of living for these people such that they no longer require to spend so much of their life working to survive?
2. I never said tax is the end all be all of the situation. It’s one attribute we can use to combat AI take over and wealth inequality in the face of a multitude of solutions that can be executed. It is not consistent with logic as shown by the wheel barrow example and I am saying it doesn’t need to be. Understand?
We, as a society, allow corporations to pull resources from the commons because the other side of it is that their existence provides a value through jobs and tax revenue and such.
If the equation shifts such that the benefits dry up, but the downsides only increase, why should we allow that?
The solution could be as simple as higher business taxes or as wild as universal basic income.
It could be something like all AI is forced to be open source, open weight, free at least as far as the knowledge parts.
There's certainly no God given right to exclusively benefit from an invention. We allow that for as long as we care to.
And there's nothing illogical about changing these decisions as factors change.
I am deeply sceptical of the idea that 99% of us are suddenly going to be idle any day now, so I think endless think pieces on what we should do when that day arrives are kind of pointless. But it is certainly obvious that if it did happen, we would have to reassess how we do stuff.
The value of labor is dependent on the demand of that labor and tools increase demand by increasing what projects can be done.
Just saying ....
That's the problem. AI has the same tax problems as corporations. But US corporate taxes are historically very low and easy to evade.
In most of the world's richest nations, the wealth inequality has become super inequality.
And for the ultra rich, the recent pandemic was a boon, not a bane. This pandemic was the best time in history, if you are a billionaire.
* According to the non-governmental organization Oxfam, the fortunes of the world’s richest people increased as much in the span of 24 months (2000-2021) as they did in 23 years. Now the bottom half of the global population would have to toil for an estimated 112 years to earn what the top 1% now rake in over just 12 months.
* “The pandemic—full of sorrow and disruption for most of humanity—has been one of the best times in recorded history for the billionaire class.”, says Oxfam.
* The world's richest people significantly increased their wealth during the pandemic, with two-thirds of the $42 trillion in new wealth going to the wealthiest 1%. Billionaires got 54% richer during pandemic. This surge in billionaire wealth occurred alongside rising poverty rates, as many individuals faced economic hardships due to the pandemic. This has raised concerns about money flowing to the well-heeled instead of to services for those hit hardest by COVID-19. It also points to broader potential implications for a sustainable reset of the global economy.
* Less than 8 cents in every dollar of tax revenue collected in G20 countries comes from taxes on wealth, says Oxfam.
* Oxfam found that the wealthiest 1% of the world population emit as much carbon pollution as the poorest two-thirds of the entire human population.
* “Only 0.4 percent of the world’s largest corporations are publicly committed to paying workers a living wage and support a living wage in their value chains”, Oxfam wrote.
* Oxfam likewise discovered that seven out of 10 of the largest corporations on the planet either have a billionaire as their CEO or have a billionaire as their principal shareholder.
* The world's richest people have significantly increased their wealth, with the top ten billionaires collectively adding over $500 billion to their fortunes this year, largely due to the booming AI sector. As of now, their combined net worth is approximately $2.5 trillion.
* 148 top corporations made $1.8 trillion in profits, 52 percent up on 3-year average, and dished out huge payouts to rich shareholders while hundreds of millions faced cuts in real-term pay.
* The world’s richest 1% own 43% of global financial assets, and the wealth of the top five billionaires has doubled since 2020, while 60% of humanity got poorer, according to a report by Oxfam.
* The five richest people on Earth in 2023 were Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Warren Buffett. Their combined wealth skyrocketed from $340 billion in 2020 to $869 billion just three years later. Adjusted for inflation, this was a real increase of 114%.
* Every year, America’s richest citizens paper over their earnings with losses and use other creative accounting strategies to shelter their fortunes, as the tax code allows them to do. As a result, the country’s billionaires pay lower tax rates than many of its millionaires do. Indeed, they pay lower tax rates than many middle-class professionals.
* Elon Musk, the world's richest man who's on track to become the world's first trillionaire, hasn't paid income tax for years.
* Many of the wealthiest individuals in the world, including billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Warren Buffett, Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg have been reported to pay little or no federal income taxes, due to legal tax avoidance strategies.
* Shockingly, the Billionaires in the U.S. pay a smaller tax rate than most teachers and nurses.
* ProPublica has obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.
* According to leaked tax returns highlighted in a ProPublica investigation, the 25 richest Americans paid $13.6 billion in taxes from 2014-2018—a “true” tax rate of just 3.4 percent on $401 billion of income.
* A new Oxfam analysis shows the wealth of the 10 richest U.S. billionaires increased by $365 billion in just 12 months, based on data from Forbes.
* According to a 2021 White House study, the wealthiest 400 billionaire families in the U.S. paid an average federal individual tax rate of just 8.2 percent. For comparison, the average American taxpayer in the same year paid 13 percent.
* The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Trump’s signature first-term domestic-policy package, helped these billionaires keep more of their money. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed this summer, extends the TCJA’s tax cuts, creates new business loopholes, and lowers taxes on estates. To help offset the revenue losses, the Trump administration is stripping health coverage from millions of low-income Americans and shrinking the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The rich, including Trump, will keep getting richer. The poor will pay for it.
Sources:
https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/stories/do-the-rich-pay...
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
https://itep.org/tax-day-billionaires-wealth-inequality-corp...
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/08/billiona...
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/wealth-five-richest-...
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/01/18/billionaires-rich...
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/less-8-cents-every-d...
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/10/the-rich-got-richer-...
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2023/01/16/how-the-worlds-...
https://fortune.com/2022/05/23/pandemic-billionaire-wealth-o...
https://www.cnbctv18.com/world/wealth-of-worlds-top-10-billi...
https://www.businessinsider.com/10-richest-people-ai-boom-te...
Worrying about a hypothetical T-1000 future seems less urgent than reducing the homelessness that exists right in front of us.
Either way, I'm so sick and tired of people talking about the effect on GDP. GDP is a terrible way to measure anything remotely meaningful. GDP has gone up and up and things have gotten worse and worse for more and more people; GDP could go down a lot and things could still get better for many people. Without some kind of (in)equality adjustment, GDP is meaningless at best and misleading at worst.
Arguably the value of a publicly traded corporation can be known because it is being traded continually. [1] For a privately held corporation it's quite opaque. Right now, for instance, Open AI is estimated to be worth $500B and might IPO at $1T but for all we know it could be a smoking hole in the ground in two years. Should we charge them a big bill in 2025 and then have the investors asking for a refund in 2027 when the real value is revised down to negative? Owners of imagined wealth could face big bills that, in the end, they couldn't pay. [2]
There would certainly be an incentive to avoid the taxation by minimizing bubbliness which might be a good thing but administering it would be a nightmare and manipulating the system to hide wealth would become a national sport.
[1] ... but it could be wrong seen from a future viewpoint
[2] I spent a lot of time in the 2010s calling up people in financial services on the phone and talking on the phone and there was no phrase that struck more fear into them than "mark-to-market", I could hear the voices crackle and feel the flinch. A bank or other institution that is perfectly able to make all its obligations as they unfold over time could be nominally insolvent at times when the market fluctuations down but winds up OK in the end -- the kind of accounting it would take to make wealth taxation accurate might be the end of fractional reserve banking and send us back to the giant Bitcoins of the Yap islands.
bofadeez•2h ago
Why would taking scarce resources away from productive businesses and allocating to unproductive things be good for anyone other than government bureaucrats?
varenc•1h ago
But feels like we're a long way from that right now.
bofadeez•1h ago
If "every country" is in debt, who owns the debt exactly? ... (it's not real debt)
WillAdams•1h ago
For an example of what unlimited borrowing and money printing results in, look up Germany in 1921--1923
lovich•1h ago
Money is a nations currency. It’s actually the people of that nations property and you only get a lease on it.
If you disagree then try to do something like ceding the land that you “own” to another nations and see how that goes
harimau777•1h ago
If we took Elon Musk's money away and simply burnt it, that would still be a net win for society as a whole.
smallmancontrov•1h ago
(It was piss.)
BurningFrog•1h ago
Until you understand how something that counter intuitive happened, you should not speculate on how AI replacing current jobs will play out!
the-mitr•1h ago
BurningFrog•25m ago
A: 250 years ago, 98% worked in farming. Today it's 2% (who produce more food!). Assume that the other 2% are at least twice as productive, and you get that 3% of the population now produces as much as 100% back then.
B: It's hard to directly estimate how much GDP per person has increased in 250 years. But the typical number economists get when trying is that it's 30x as big. Which means 3.3% of today's workforce produces as much (per person) as the whole workforce did back then.
Both A and B can be critiqued, but the precise numbers don't really matter for the argument.
harimau777•1h ago
smallmancontrov•1h ago
No?
Hmmmmmm.
varenc•54m ago
The Industrial Revolution mostly ate mechanical labor and created more 'thinking' and knowledge worker jobs closer to the top of the stack. AGI goes after the information / decision-making layer itself. And it's unclear how much remains once those are automated.
BurningFrog•34m ago
Whatever you call it, jobs keep getting "stolen" by technology, and yet employment rates stay high and average living standard keeps rising.
I'm genuinely fascinated by how this keeps happening, decade after decade, and yet most people are convinced the opposite is happening. I'm old enough to remember this exact discussion from 50 years ago.
We all see and interact with jobs that did not exist 20 years ago, and many of us work those jobs. And yet... this knowledge is somehow compartmentalized away from future expectations.
If you want a theoretical framework for why this keeps happening, my thought is that unemployed humans are an unused resource. And capitalism is really good at finding ways to use those.
CrossVR•1h ago
bofadeez•1h ago
t-writescode•1h ago
seanmcdirmid•59m ago
nemomarx•1h ago
xg15•1h ago
bofadeez•1h ago
smallmancontrov•1h ago
According to the economic notion of value, which is unique among definitions of "value" in being wealth-weighted, enshrining "mega gainz in brokerage accounts" as the ultimate social good while shrugging its shoulders at the plight of the ahem low-weight individual.
bofadeez•1h ago
smallmancontrov•1h ago
That's not really the problem, though. The problem is that rich people have most of the money and rich people care mostly about one thing: getting paid for being rich. That happens when assets go up.
Assets have a counterparty, so policy that pumps assets can do so by encouring genuine growth (difficult, unreliable) or by whacking the counterparty over the head (easy, reliable). Anti-consumer and anti-labor policy makes stocks go up, for example. NIMY policies make real-estate go up. Selling our industrial base to the Communist Party of China makes bonds go up.
Once rich people get all of the money (US gini is 0.83, are we there yet?) the objective function of the entire system shifts away from satisfying the needs of people and towards whacking counterparties of assets over the head. It's an ugly thing to see, once you know how to see it.
> bofadeez
Your name and arguments are both young-libertarian coded so let me take a shot in the dark at a personal appeal: the reason why houses are so damn difficult for you to afford is that you are the counterparty.
harimau777•1h ago
The purpose of a system is what it does.
harimau777•1h ago