Exactly. This is such a silly argument. The article takes the argument "if a lot of jobs disappeared since they are now done effectively for free, what about tax revenue??"
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?
> You're transported into a world in which efficiencies mean that much fewer people need to work,
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?
> 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...
That's a pretty Matrix "human-battery" level attitude to your fellow brothers and sisters. "They need to work to pay taxes, rent, and insurance". Ie, they only exist and are allowed to live to be serfs - or cattle really.
Or...infrastructure, public services and schools go unmaintained? How about the magic technology supposedly allowing for all of this efficency, all the while it imagines a human has six fingers, who will maintain that?
Also, if magical robot AI makes private operations more efficient, requiring less cost for the same or more amount, then it can do the same thing for government operations.
So, even more people out on the streets desperately trying to get their slice of survival by being sexually available to the equity lords? Because what else will there be?
I'm not so sure this argument is valid. The invention of the wheel barrow created new jobs in wheel barrow manufacturing and distribution. On the other hand, the promise/threat of AI seems to be the complete displacement of humans in many industries without creating alternative employment for the vast majority.
It does lead to people loosing their job. If you have a pile of dirt that needs 3 people to move it with buckets but now 1 person can move the same pile with a wheelbarrow then the 2 others are out of a job.
Same as when one developer with AI can do the job of 3 developers and the other 2 are fired.
do you have stats on moving of dirt with buckets vs. moving with wheelbarrows? Or is this just an assumption you are making? I think probably an assumption because how often do people move piles of dirt without wheelbarrows nowadays so where would you actually have your data from?
In my anecdotal experience moving piles of dirt manually (for large piles of dirt) it is generally the digging up of the dirt that takes the most effort, if I had to move it with buckets or a wheelbarrow I would still expect that to be the case.
I would furthermore expect that there are some functions at work in modelling the moving of large piles of dirt using manual labor.
Your model may make sense with a small pile of dirt but I don't think you will find 1 remains and 2 go, at best 1 goes and you take a bit longer to move the pile.
Also, this is just my observations of having had large piles of dirt to move with manual labor (including wheelbarrows and several of those) As you scale up the amount of people you could drop by adding wheelbarrows goes down, because again the main problem is the digging. The wheelbarrows becomes a thing you trade off diggers on running. You will want to have more wheelbarrows that wheelbarrow users so that diggers can fill wheelbarrows while the users are running the already filled wheelbarrows to where the dirt is being dumped.
At this point then you would probably want to drop the wheelbarrow analogy and go to a backhoe and a truck, but then all of the various observations of the other flaws in the wheelbarrow argument become apparent, such as the factories to build backhoes and trucks, the training for backhoe operator etc. All leading to a relatively strong argument that existence of backhoes and trucks are a boost to the environment, potential job creator and those jobs will be more skilled jobs leading to higher wages in the economy.
It increases the value for that one person who uses the wheelbarrow sure, but it does not raise the value of labour in aggregate. The same would be true of AI tools.
I did not argue the tools lowered the value of labour in aggregate - I merely said that they did not increase it. However, the effect on the individual and the group are different. If you have 10 people carrying boulders across the field, and you introduce a wheelbarrow, and now you have one person carrying the same amount of boulders across the field, the total aggregate value of labour has stayed the same. This particular person can certainly capture more of that aggregate value than they could have before, but the total value has not gone up. It’s also true that now you have lowered the cost of moving boulders across the field, so yes, there could be more demand for whatever it is you’re selling and that could mean that maybe you need two or three workers with wheelbarrows. but I think if you’re going to talk about the value of aggregate labor, you have to control for the amount of demand.
Wheelbarrows are pretty simple devices, I’m sure many people just made them on their own. But even accepting this point, there’s no particular reason why we should expect that every invention until now generated new and different types of work, just not this one. The people talking about complete displacement are selling you a story because it gets them clicks and sells books.
A little known economic fact – the wheel was actually invented billions of years ago by bacteria and reinvented by every species since. It’s just that they all held off using it until they could be sure that it would create jobs. Thankfully thousands of years ago, human economists finally did the math and let everyone know that it checked out!
Yeah absolutely, and they shouldn't be taxed extra specifically for using a new technology. If people need a UBI they should be paid it off the back of all taxes (which should rise if automation is successful), not a specific automation tax. Saving jobs sounds good and it's an easy win but you end up with a stagnant economy where people are paid sinecures to do make-work, which is doubly harmful since the company has to pay extra for the employee, who is also deprived of being able to do some other job that would be useful to the economy.
They already have, significantly, around 25-35% in developed economies. The issue is that people often look at revenue, seeing company X earning $100 billion annually, and assume they should pay $20 billion in taxes. However, most AI companies today are not profitable and spend up to 100% more than their revenue on R&D and product development. I doubt they will turn a profit anytime soon, probably not for at least a decade.
> They already have, significantly, around 25-35% in developed economies
The thing is companies and even self-employed individuals of a certain wealth level know how to "(ab)use" it. From illegal but trivial and hard to detect tax evasion to financing personal lifestyle by having the company pay for certain luxuries (cars, computers, furniture, etc.).
If you have the wealth to have a dedicated office that dedicated office can be your man cave if you justify it with having all sorts of amenities for customers. And good luck to whoever checks taxes to find out how exactly things are used/not used.
All of that usually means that companies, company owners and high ranking managers get away with not paying taxes for a lot of things that everyone else does simply because they don't have a say within these companies.
And all of that is before you go to the tax advisor.
I am sorry, but if you do hard honest work the chances of you getting rich are beyond slim. Even worse when you do something that actually benefits society.
You tax where you can not where you should. Corporations trivially hide profits. What they couldn't hide well was labor. You know what else they can't hide? Their power bill. It even works for companies that eternally operate "at loss" (which also parallels taxing labor).
The problem is that thousands of sub-stackers, journalists, and "thought leaders" have realized they can make a living writing a weekly think piece speculating that AI will take jobs.
A lot of them are bullshit jobs though. We've yet to see "AI" do anything actually beneficial. I don't mean the stuff that was done before the AI hype like categorizing bacteria, etc.
Watch the news. One crisis after another, so maybe that freed up work force and the wealth generated by "AI" should be used to tackle at least one of them.
Huge amounts of taxes and dedication of that money could be a first step.
Alternatively don't raise taxes and use the oh so great AI to tackle these issues. Should be trivial if you have ">90%" of all work freed up.
To some degree we already do. Corporations pay taxes.
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.
Indeed, there’s nothing illogical about adjusting tax rates and structures as things 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.
This is utterly backwards and your false statement leads to a completely wrong set of inferences.
We don't let corporations do anything because they provide value through jobs and taxes. What company do you know that exists (beyond transiently) solely by paying taxes and employing people?
Companies are an extension of the individual, they exist to make money for the individuals that own them so that those individuals can acquire goods and services that they themselves need or desire.
How do companies make this money? Holding people at gun point and taking it is generally illegal; instead they resort to providing goods or services to some set of people who are willing to pay for them.
To provide these goods or services they need to employ people. The fewer people companies in aggregate can employ, the better for people in aggregate since those people can acquire "things" (food, jewellery, phones,...) for less of their own labour (or equivalent dollars).
If the "benefits dry up" as you say, people will stop sending their hard earned money to this company and the company will eventually cease to exist. Your fallacy was assuming the benefits were the jobs and taxes, not the goods and services provided.
Corporations don’t provide goods or services: people inside them do. Corporations are a legal structure we allow to exist because it enables jobs and taxes.
Corporations don’t have to exist; they are a creation of society and thus can - and I think obviously- should be changed
Have you ever done anything together with a group of other people? That is a company. That's why they are called companies. They are a group of people doing things.
That has existed for millions of years already. First as hunting companies, then as raiding companies. It exists in other species as well. It will never go away. It has existed in every human society, no matter what political or economical ideology.
The real question is how companies should be organized and owned.
Okay, ban the corporation as a legal entity. And all other companies as legal entity so that they don't become an escape hatch.
It will not take longer than until sunrise next morning before all those corporations are now different single individuals who contract their whole company structure again and now have everything from job contracts to investor contracts in their own names instead, using probably the same kind of complicated contracts that preceded the modern corporation as a legal entity. What did you benefit?
Not even remotely true; corporations as we would recognise them today pre-date the legal system as we would recognise it today (and have existed in just about every legal system since).
Certain configurations of the corporation are described in our laws, e.g. "limited liability".
The folks agitating for “social revolt” are not people at risk of losing their jobs, rather it’s the same people who’ve been agitating for social revolt for decades - people wealthy enough to spend years in university reading critical theory whose financial security was never at risk, whether from wheelbarrows or robots.
I hope you still feel you arent losing when your job is gone and thus your income and woops there goes your home because you cant afford your rent/mortgage anymore.
Sure but price to income has never been lower if you're willing to move and work remotely (or retire on investment income) somewhere cheaper.
If you want to live in the best real estate in the world and expect to continue doing so when you have no job, that's not going to happen. If you're willing to adapt and spread out you can live better and freer than ever in a hypothetical world where AI has taken most jobs.
1. We are absolutely losing. Wealth inequality has never been higher in human history. How does a single human amass such wealth when his physical and intellectual output doesn’t even match that level of equivalent worth? The first reason is he scrapes it off others, and the second reason is technological automation. AI is just one bump in the road of technological innovation magnifying work output.
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?
