- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.org
Nvidia CEO Foresees AI Competing with Human Intelligence in Five Years::Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicts that AI will compete with human intelligence in the next five years, amidst a significant business boom for Nvidia and its AI advancements.
I have been saying, that automation should be taxed for years now, and people hate it. The poem “First they came …” comes to mind.
Tax the business (on revenue or profit) at a high enough rate it hurts, then give tax breaks to incentivize “fully employed workers with benefits meeting ‘X’ minimums”….
Use automation if it is the correct answer for productivity or solving a given problem but you still have to kick in for the society you want to live in. Businesses shouldn’t get to harvest all of the value out of a society without contributing. Providing jobs was the old mechanism… now it’s evolving.
If they offshore hq to dodge taxation, tax the local product or service at a commensurate rate. If you want access to our marketplace, you chip in, too. That should go for every country on the planet.
I’m not saying tax them to stop it, but to stop wealth inequality.
Here we tax pollution, but companies still pollute. But the government can use the tax money to try and offset the pollution.
If no one has a job, there are no customers.
Rational self-interest can only operate alone for so long. Then all the rules change, one way or another.
Taxed? Fuck that. Any AI with human intelligence deserves at least minimum wage.
But automation encompasses more than just AI with human intelligence. For the other cases, it should be taxed and the money used to fund more social nets.
Yes all the big tech companies are in desperate need of more money, the poor things.
How would it get measured?
Would should automation be disincentivized?
Just tax revenue and wealth.
I spent a little while thinking about this earlier in the year, I had the idea formed more cogently at time but I’ll try and put it as best as I remember. Income tax can kind of be restated as a tax on a corporation as a function of the value an individual provides to the company.
This isn’t perfect but, I’m a PAYE employee, so the income tax I pay is done so at source. I don’t ever see that money. In real terms it makes little difference to me whether I pay zero income tax and the company reduces my salary but pays a fee to the government for the privilege of employing me. The tax rates don’t change hugely over time and I’m not on the margins of a tax band, so this mostly holds true for me. My salary and the tax band that puts me in are a proxy for the value I provide to the company (under the assumption I make net positive money for the company).
I feel like an explicit change to codify this is required to allow for the proper taxation of companies undergoing a shift to automation, otherwise it’s too easy to domicile profits/wealth elsewhere (as it stands). Even thinking about this now, for knowledge work, how do you tax a company in Germany when the processing is happening on a privacy compliant server in Somalia? Even more stringent data protection and localisation laws? Can your models cross borders? Does that lead to multi-tier AI based on the capabilities of underlying populations and availability of training data?
Generally I’m pro-humans not having to grind to live and I generally see AI/automation as a boon for this - alongside proper taxation and redistribution of wealth, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen any good explanation of how the nitty gritty of this functions in the real world.
Look around the world. In poor countries, productivity is low. There are not many machines. People do a lot of manual labor. Rich countries have lots of automation.
If you want to live in a country with less automation, moving is an option. Migrating from a rich to a poor country is much easier than vice versa. But if that looks unappealing, then taxing automation should also be unappealing.
Working less isn’t horrible. The OECD estimates that an average employee in the USA works 1811 hours per year. In Germany, it is only 1341, You can always volunteer in a non-profit if you feel you don’t have enough to do. There’s nothing to be afraid of. I don’t even know why or on what Americans work so much. It feels like they spend half the office day on social media, complaining that they can’t afford things.
Because knowledge work is never ending. There’s always more to do.
As an American, I’ve worked with lots of my European counterparts over the years, and trying to get things done can be downright painful.
We’re across multiple time zones, and Europeans refuse to be on a call that isn’t in their typical work hours.
Kind of problematic when there’s no one “time” where a Central Time American can be on a call during his work hours while a Brit, German, and an Estonian do to.
Multiple people will have to be flexible here, and assuredly it won’t be our Western Europe peers.
There are things like change windows, to reduce risk of downtime for users. Those are established by when the users utilize the resources being changed. Sometimes that means I work a normal day, and get back on things at midnight or 2am to make a change and validate it. It needs to be done then, it’s important, it’s been entered into a massive scheduling system which tracks resources: subcontractor time, staff time, access to things like VM hosts to ensure our change doesn’t conflict with other changes to shared hosts/network/power, etc. Many internal and external organizations can be involved in changes, the external generally incur additional cost, so we try to combine as many changes as possible to minimize that cost.
This is just one small example of the coordination involved in herding the cats of large infrastructure.
SMB is much easier, far fewer people and system impacts, practically no change management, so if something happens days later, tracing it back to those changes can be difficult or impossible. It’s more wild-west, with knowledge retained in a small set of admins. Even there it can take many conversations between local power, remote power, subcontractors, vendors, telco, cloud providers, etc to manage changes. These can all be geographically disparate (I have a friend with a client with operations in CA, CO, NM, WV, MO). That’s 3 time zones, with vendors, subcontractors, and contracts in all of them, under varying legal jurisdictions and regulatory domains. Something as simple as updating/replacing a remote monitor cell router can take months of conversations. Without the upgrade, they’re in violation of state and federal regulations, with fines that can be $10k/day or more.
Just because you have no idea what other people do, doesn’t make it any less important or valuable. Any boss is very appreciative when you stay on a call “past 5” to help prevent being fined like that. (I’ve been on calls that lasted 24hrs+, over Thanksgiving).
I just received this 6 day old post as new. I guess that’s due to the issues with federation.
I’m not really sure what you are going for here. Are you saying that Americans need to work more hours to make up for the slack of Europeans?
Automation wont stop because of taxes… There needs to be money, for the people that loses jobs to automation. The products wont get cheaper with more automation.
I wouldn’t want to move to a third world country like america, where the low taxes that are paid by the little guy, are used to help the big guy. I’m fine living in a country, where my relatively high taxes can make the country even better.
Imagine you want to produce something. Maybe you want to bake a couple 10,000 breads over the next few years. Whatever. You could hire 50 guys and buy some simple tools, or you could hire 5 guys and buy some advanced machinery. What do you do?
The typical business will pick the cheaper option. It will replace as much labor with machines as is cost-effective. A few businesses will make a thing out of being inefficient and expensive, like how Rolls-Royce cars are handmade.
If you tax automation, you make the machines more expensive. So, when someone has the choice between using machines or using labor, then it will be labor more often. So, you’re right: It won’t stop automation. You will just have less of it. Productivity will be lower. The country will be always be poorer than without such a tax.
People in such a country will either have to work more hours for the extra labor needed or do with less.
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Yes, so you need more labor to get the same amount of product. Isn’t that what I wrote?
I agree that use of machines can give you economies of scale, which makes large businesses more competitive. So a tax on automation could indirectly benefit smaller businesses at the cost of society. I am not quite sure why a society would want that, though?
It’s surprising that your education in business did not include a section in economic efficiency. My American business education really leaned in on that concept, so maybe that’s where our views diverge.
Having said that, your argument isn’t compelling. Your entire counterargument is, “Your example is not reality”. Can you provide a case study or a real life example of your suggestion in practice?
Oh shit yeah, america known for it’s wealth inequality, homeless and bailing out big business. Hopefully not from Trump University?
Asking for case studies after spouting a hypothetical… “I would like to see documentation, if it’s an argument against the thing, that I didn’t present with any.”
But sure, I’ll just call up my old employer and ask if I can look through his files, because an american can’t believe capitalism isn’t the only way. Hope he remembers me. I will also look through my old phone to see if I can find pictures of the empty automated, highly taxed, leading bakeries (like Pågen) that made the bread with the machines we produced.
Okay so it seems I struck a nerve, sorry that wasn’t my intention. I pointed out my different background to illustrate why I might have a different perspective than you.
Until now, I’ve never heard of a situation where an automation tax has been implemented, so a case study would be a great way for me to understand the circumstances that led to it working. I’ll look into Pågen when I have a chance, since that seems like it could be a lead.
Capitalism certainly isn’t the end-all solution, but arguably it’s one of the best systems we’ve come up with so far.
I think that we in the US don’t have nearly enough regulations to rein in the negative aspects of capitalism, but the most popular argument against further regulation is that it stifles innovation, and that’s scary enough to people that we aren’t taking enough steps to get ahead of it.
Also… Trump University 😂😂😂