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Posted26 days ago
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Why would taking scarce resources away from productive businesses and allocating them into bureaucracy be a good idea?
If "every country" is in debt, who owns the debt exactly? ... (it's not real debt)
For an example of what unlimited borrowing and money printing results in, look up Germany in 1921--1923
(It was piss.)
If we took Elon Musk's money away and simply burnt it, that would still be a net win for society as a whole.
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
Until you understand how something that counter intuitive happened, you should not speculate on how AI replacing current jobs will play out!
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.
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.
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.
No?
Hmmmmmm.
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.
We aren't just talking loaves of bread: as you get more money, you shift from consuming to saving=investing. Your wealth-weighted power stops demanding extra gadgets and starts demanding that stocks, bonds, and real estate go up.
Assets have a counterparty, so policy that pumps assets can do so by encouring genuine growth (difficult, unreliable) or by whacking your 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. Allowing cross-border labor and environmental arbitrage 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.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
When Amazon stopped investing and started extracting those profits everyone paid taxes on that giant money pile that wouldn’t exist without the investment. Every Amazon worker, CEO included, paid taxes all along. Amazon’s service providers and partners did. Amazon now does too, and the tax coffers have won big.
Taxation offsets from investments should be broadened (to individuals), not shamed.
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.
OTOH, I don't more than partially agree.
We can stipulate that some kind of mathematical perfection is unattainable, sure. The discussion might then move to the feedback loops that detect the state of the State and offer stabilizing input.
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?
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?
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.
- healthcare
- armed forces
- road/utility maintenance
bacially everything funded by taxes
You AI bros keep telling us about the workless utopia you're ushering us into, but so far we've only ever seen proof that your intent is to eliminate wages. None of you will answer questions like "how do I pay rent" or "how does my baby eat" in your supposed post-work utopia. Eliminating work does not eliminate ownership of resources or land or the desire to profit off of those things.
But ok look at it this way... What is silly about taxing a sector that is undertaxed because the current system assumed income taxes?
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?
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.
https://fortune.com/2025/11/07/what-is-the-k-shaped-economy-...
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.
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).
Corporations don’t have to exist; they are a creation of society and thus can - and I think obviously- should be changed
Certain configurations of the corporation are described in our laws, e.g. "limited liability".
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.
Clearly we're talking about a specific modern legal entity with a specific organization that, as you say, can change.
It will not take longer than until sunrise next morning before all those corporations are now different single individuals who contracts the whole company structure again and now has everything from job contracts to investor contracts in his own name instead, using probably the same kind of complicated contracts that preceded the modern corporation as a legal entity. What did you benefit?
All of what you said can be true and also others can and do decide to allow or disallow a group to exist.
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.
Same as when one developer with AI can do the job of 3 developers and the other 2 are fired.
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.
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.
Hold on now, how will 'trickle-down' economics work then ? Think of the poor companies trying to provide a living for all those AI. /s
AI is on track to being able to remove a society-changing amount of jobs, wheel barrows improved worker's efficiency.
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.
social unrest must be priced in at this point somewhere
That's unique in human history
Sadly not unique in human history.
Anyone who believes that people who own land and the resources extracted from that land (minerals, oil/gas, food, water, etc) is going to give it away because their labor inputs got cheaper thanks to AI and robotics, would have to be smoking plastic. The wageless utopia these AI clowns think they want isn't going to have cheaper or free rent or groceries or medicine, just fatter pockets for the owners of those things.
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.
My hesitation comes from the fact that most proposals implicitly assume a “fixed physical capability” for AI systems — something we don’t actually have yet.
In practice, social impact won’t be determined by abstractions but by power budgets, GPU throughput, reliability of autonomous systems, and years of real-world operation.
If scaling hits physical or economic limits, the eventual policy debate may look more like progressive taxation on high-wattage compute or specialized hardware than anything being discussed today.
And if fully automated systems ever run safely for several consecutive years, that would still be early enough for the Overton window to shift.
I’m not dismissing long-term thinking.
I’m pointing out the opportunity cost: attention spent on hypothetical futures tends to displace attention from problems that exist right now. That tradeoff rarely appears in the discussion.
So for me it’s just a question of balance — how much time we allocate to tomorrow’s world versus today’s neighborhood.
From my own vantage point, the future talk feels disproportionately dominant, so the T-1000 analogy came naturally.
We talk about tomorrow far more than we talk about what’s happening right in front of us. Quantum computing was ‘just around the corner.’ It wasn’t. Fusion was ‘imminent.’ Still isn’t.
I never argued we shouldn’t discuss the future.
I said it’s a matter of balance — something I already stated explicitly.
The obvious answer is both, but in the right proportion. That’s the entire point I’ve been making from the start. If you’re proposing that future-policy talk should take precedence for them, I’m not sure how that adds up.
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.
You’re literally just describing an end to private property, where a privileged government representative can take anything you have. Pretty sure the “government job” will become so lucrative that the position would be passed down within families, father to son. Pretty sure it is already known how these economic systems function.
As for why would anyone start a business? There's no disincentive to start a business in this scheme. I'd say the current system has greater obstacles to starting a business in many cases, due to high barriers to entry and regulatory capture by large players. The purpose of policies like the ones I describe is to encourage people to start small businesses and keep them small. You can grow your business up until its value is around that taxation threshold and then just kick back. We don't want people taking big businesses and making them bigger.
One interesting aspect of trying to quantify wealth and tax based on that — is that it gives enormous advantage to bearers of wealth that is difficult to quantify. For example, political followers is wealth that you can't tax, but one can turn into profit very easily and in many sneaky ways. Also power in general (power to collect taxes, power to control law enforcement and army, or people with guns in general) is wealth that isn't quantifiable in monetary amounts. So in this system powerful people will be much more powerful because they will start accumulating all other forms of wealth, and very difficult to restrict — why would they use their power to restrict themselves? They would use their power to remove any restrictions at the highest priority.
So instead of the current system (people willing to invent new things and work overtime for years to bring value to millions of people for a chance of outsized returns — and sometimes earning them) you get a system where political class seizes all power, removes all checks and balances, redistributes wealth production to themselves, and unleashes violence to rule forever. It has been tried many times.
> Government employees doing as you describe would also be subject to severe penalties
This only works in capitalistic open societies where wealth doesn't concentrate with government employees.
> The purpose of policies like the ones I describe is to encourage people to start small businesses and keep them small
Not all businesses can be small. How can a small business construct an airplane? Organize a nation-wide or international postal delivery service? Build millions of cars with spare parts available for decades? Make food, clothing, and shelter for millions? These things require economies of scale to be affordable. And yes, government-managed big businesses have also been tried, they tend to be very unproductive, and produce expensive and low-quality items (with tendencies to significantly decline over years).
> So instead of the current system (people willing to invent new things and work overtime for years to bring value to millions of people for a chance of outsized returns — and sometimes earning them) you get a system where political class seizes all power, removes all checks and balances, redistributes wealth production to themselves, and unleashes violence to rule forever.
I have some thoughts in response to some of your other points, but I think the fundamental disagreement here is that what you describe as "the system you get" is what I call the system we have, except that the powerful class in question is a sort of hybrid political/economic oligarch class.
The other way I would think about this is that what you call "the government" I would call "the public". We need radical transparency in all government action so that any kind of shenanigans such as you describe cannot occur, and we need to reflexively insist on this transparency regardless of whether we suspect any shenanigans in a particular case.
> Not all businesses can be small. How can a small business construct an airplane?
This is the best counterargument, and indeed airplanes are the example I've come up with as well when I formulated this counterargument to myself. However, I wouldn't describe this as "requiring economies of scale". It's just a matter of some products inherently being more complex (e.g., an airplane is more complex than a wooden spoon).
I think we should view economies of scale very critically. People say that economies of scale are "necessary" to keep things "affordable" for consumers. But in practice large economies of scale tend towards monopolism that in fact makes consumers more vulnerable to gouging. Economies of scale primarily benefit the producers that have them, and only indirectly and uncertainly benefit anyone else.
That said, if the goal is wealth diffusion, companies can become bigger the more diffuse their ownership. So, say, a worker-owned aerospace company could grow larger than one controlled by a small group of shareholders.
Finally, people talk a lot about the theoretical benefits of "innovation", but in my view innovation is also something to view skeptically. Perhaps in a world where there were a lot of small startups building airplanes or better mousetraps and competing genuinely on quality and price, we could think about relaxing some of the strictures I've mentioned. But that's not the world we live in. Much of what passes for "innovation" today is simply gaming the system, hoodwinking customers, and dodging consequences for harmful actions. I believe that this is connected to the fact that so many "innovative" companies are the type you mentioned above, essentially a venture capital gamble on some kind of high-concept startup, with a desired outcome of many total flops and a few gigantic runaway "unicorn" jackpots. That isn't healthy innovation and we should not only not encourage it but should actively prevent it. We want steady, incremental, monitored innovation, not a boom and bust cycle based on who can make the best sales pitch to their favorite billionaire. It is okay to never have another Facebook, another OpenAI, etc.
Sounds like a great way to throw the economy into a depression.
Could we live with less productive capital? Sure. It wouldn't be anywhere near as nice.
You likely live in a wealthy country - your wealth should be taken from you and given to a poorer country.
You don't deserve a car when there's people who don't have a bicycle.
This makes it unwise to attempt to do such transfers on a large scale. That said, I would support something like a tax whose revenues are specifically directed towards improving the lives of much-worse-off people elsewhere in the world in ways that are carefully chosen so as to be less vulnerable to graft. (These would likely be in-kind benefits like latrine construction, etc., rather than monetary grants.)
It has been tried. Wealth tax means rich people (who already pay most of the taxes) are leaving the country, then the state gets fewer taxes, not more.
Wealth moves in lots of ways. Yes, as has been pointed out, we over value stock assets. When you own a significant percentage of a company, you can't just sell that ownership at the last trading price (the stock price would quickly crash). Wealth is also moved between national borders, allowing the wealthy to shop for the lowest tax location to stash their funds. Property can't be moved, but it can be financed with debt, making it taxed at effectively 0%. And the other side of that debt may just be an overseas shell company. There will be entire industries formed around avoiding a wealth tax, funded by the wealthy.
But probably the most capital efficient way to avoid the wealth tax is to buy politicians, influence the elections, and invest in lobbyist, which the wealthy do in the US to avoid taxes. Until money is removed from politics, I'm not holding out any hope that we'll find a way to tax the wealthy.
People on the left love to say “true communism has never been tried”.
Well, when you live in a world where supposed capitalist countries forcibly take 46% of the GDP to be controlled by the government, it’s more accurate to state that “true capitalism has never been tried”.
What the US dominates is LLMs.
What's your solution on that? (this itself is stupid populist move but underlying issue is a major one)
Actually, that sounds awesome, keep your AI out of here.
Don't tax tools or income, tax the accumulation of it: wealth.
Nobody calls alcohol duty “micromanagement”.
For products like petrol, it’s widely known that from money paid for a liter when it’s sold, say, in the UK, more money stays in the UK’s government pocket via a complex web of taxes and duties, than profits the oil production company that supplied crude oil for that petrol.
Maybe taxing a kWh of the AI data center energy consumption should be a thing? I don’t know.
That sounds excellent. Also water usage.
Really, AI has externalities and it should pay for it.
Should an AI data center from pharmaceuticals or biotech startup be taxed extra per kWh, even if the AI is purely used for medical research?
> Should an AI data center from pharmaceuticals or biotech startup be taxed extra per kWh, even if the AI is purely used for medical research?
That's not a gotcha.. those are all policy choices. My personal preference is, yes, of course - medical research today is taxed just fine. If there's lobbying to specifically grant tax benefits to medical research, I can see an exception being carved.
Just saying ....
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