Halls of Shrewd'm / US Policy
No. of Recommendations: 0
No. of Recommendations: 5
Bernie:
The public should own 50 percent of these companies.
An interesting idea. I would probably modify it: if you generate revenue using an LLM in the US, you pay 50% of your revenue in taxes. In return from this, you are indemnified against all but the most egregious claims of appropriation of you IP to make the AI work.
As a human, you buy books, you go to school and learn from books, and no one can collect because you are using IP developed by other humans. But "they" can tax you for any income you do get.
Why not make it the same with AI? An AI being trained on books and recordings of classes is in some ways just like a person learning from books and classes, and the human doesn't owe money for the IP. That is, you write a text book about how to design apps, I am taught from that textbook in a class, any apps I write are mine, the writer of the text book can't come after me. But I can be taxed, in general, on every bit of money I make whether as a wage or through creating an App myself and selling it.
So what happens to all that money collected for AIs operating, harvesting the fruit of all previous human intellectual effort? It is divided between all the humans!
This is by far not the stupidest thing I have ever heard of.
R:)
No. of Recommendations: 0
Why not make it the same with AI? An AI being trained on books and recordings of classes is in some ways just like a person learning from books and classes, and the human doesn't owe money for the IP. That is, you write a text book about how to design apps, I am taught from that textbook in a class, any apps I write are mine, the writer of the text book can't come after me. But I can be taxed, in general, on every bit of money I make whether as a wage or through creating an App myself and selling it.
So what happens to all that money collected for AIs operating, harvesting the fruit of all previous human intellectual effort? It is divided between all the humans!
Indeed, the writer receives compensation when the students purchase the book to learn the information it provides.
Unlike when AI consumes information.
No. of Recommendations: 9
I think the problem is that a good portion of government revenue is generated by taxing work through income taxes.
If the work is done by an AI agent that revenue is harder to capture.
Moving away from a tax on work is probably required at some point if agentic work starts to become more prevelant.
tecmo
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No. of Recommendations: 3
"I think the problem is that a good portion of government revenue is generated by taxing work through income taxes.
If the work is done by an AI agent revenue is harder to capture.
Moving away from a tax on work is probably required at some point if agentic work starts to become more prevalent."
In the nineteenth century, the federal government was supported by almost entirely by tariffs. Chester A. Arthur, an agent of the New York political machine run by Roscoe Conklin, served as the Collector of the Port of New York from 1871 to 1878, which collected 75% of the federal government's revenues, and was a notorious source of graft, etc. There was no income tax; it was considered immoral and too hard to collect.
It's not difficult to collect taxes on digital activities, especially when they run through a blockchain. The AI companies charge for AI using "tokens", which are essentially units of value based on the resources used. Some companies are now freaking out at how many tokens their workers are consuming and how much their AI usage is costing, and are trying to figure out how to reduce that cost.
However, (a) the current crop of regulators doesn't know how to implement such a system, (b) most members of Congress would not understand it, and (c) there is no constituency calling for it. It's also much harder to cheat a digital system. So nothing happens. Maybe a good thing, I dunno.
Also, we may need a national digital currency to make a digital tax system work, and that will also be controversial.
I agree changes are needed, but IMHO it will be the next generation who makes them. Onward!
abromber
No. of Recommendations: 4
It's not difficult to collect taxes on digital activities, especially when they run through a blockchain. The AI companies charge for AI using "tokens", which are essentially units of value based on the resources used. Some companies are now freaking out at how many tokens their workers are consuming and how much their AI usage is costing, and are trying to figure out how to reduce that cost.
One option would be to require that all AI tokens consumed in a country, must also have those tokens generated in the country (a token tariff!); then you could tax the power consumption.
The challenge of course is that you also want to remain competitive, meaning that if you tax the Agents, the companies will just 'offshore' the agents (what ever that means). I am sure that some sort of protections are coming, but probably very slowly.
My personal opinion is that consumption taxes in the US are too low, and income taxes are too high - balancing that is probably a good start. I think Bezos floated an idea of eliminating taxes on all income under $80K or some amount significantly higher than current levels. Adding in a 10% VAT and adjusting income tax brackets would shift the tax revenue sources a lot. Then layer in an asset tax on amounts over say $100M and you have a much more balanced tax policy...(perhaps 1% annually, with some ability to adjust - say taking the average amount during the past 3 years as the basis).
Lots of potential ideas...
tecmo
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No. of Recommendations: 1
So what happens to all that money collected for AIs operating, harvesting the fruit of all previous human intellectual effort? It is divided between all the humans!
Indeed, the writer receives compensation when the students purchase the book to learn the information it provides.
Unlike when AI consumes information.
Easy to do this with smart contracts on a blockchain. Just like BMI/ASCAP does it now with radio. Who created what, and who uses what (including access and citation by AI), is tracked by tokens, and smart contracts just allocate the revenue automatically, according to agreed-upon formulae. As a practical matter, revenues are converted to digital currency, which is deposited ratione et ordine into everyone's digital accounts automatically, no humans required, and a public audit is available anytime. In the not-too-distant future, this is how everything will be done, so in a sense, this is just the 21st-century digital version of the "creators versus publishers" battle that has been going on for millennia. Jesters didn't always get paid, and there wasn't much they could do about it.
DIS, NFLX and WBD could already use tokens to share content-generated revenue with creators if they wanted. They already know who uses their content and for what, and they use that as the basis for what they charge. Almost all traditional publishers do this. To do it on-chain, they would have to adopt new systems and code all of their content. Massive undertaking, no one can agree on how to do it, and no one other than the creators really cares if they do it or not. Eventually, they will have to. But it will take some time, and publishers will delay as long as they can. It will also be much easier to do this going forward than backward, which is why the fight is about future rights, not past rights.
Not to worry: AI is going to figure it all out for us. Onward!
abromber
