The Push to Tax AI LLM Words

Whenever there is a lot of money moving around, there are parasites wanting a piece of the action. WSJ:

To actually discourage AI-driven job replacement, some call for a “compute” or “robot” tax, perhaps levied on tokens (the unit of AI usage). This, though, could be a nightmare to design and administer, and discourage the use of AI to benefit all humanity, such as new drug discovery.

That brings us to the tax system. The case for low taxes on capital is that this boosts investment, which raises productivity and, ultimately, wages.

A comment:

Insane.

WSJ editor has lost his mind by permitting this writer's harebrained assault on its readership. The whole purpose of the WSJ is to explore ways to increase the efficiency of private capital deployment to accelerate GDP in the future.

Stealing more of Americans' already multi-taxed capital accumulations to deploy to the unaccountable, genuinely corrupt, black hole for money government is Genghis Khan economics.

The CCP and USSR, one might recall, taxed private capital 100%, nationalizing the economy and stealing investors' wealth as the two murdered 120M citizens in my lifetime.

A couple of investment bankers write in the NY Times:

In order to achieve progress that is both consistent and sustainable, two things are required from A.I. policy: We must make society resilient to disruption and we must avert technological catastrophe. Failing to accomplish either of these goals means failing to achieve the promise of A.I. ...

Tax policy must stop disincentivizing human labor over machine labor. Because only human labor is taxed, the scale is tipped toward substitution. A consumption tax on A.I. tokens may flip this script. ...

Absent action today, mitigation of A.I.’s risks will become nearly impossible as the technology diffuses and models become able to improve themselves and act autonomously. We may have only one shot at taking meaningful action.

During the dot-com boom of the 1990s, everyone was talking about how often internet bandwidth was doubling, and how it was going to disrupt business models. Did anyone propose taxing the bit transmission and using the money to preserve jobs?

Maybe they did, but no such taxes were enacted. In retrospect, they would have been foolish.

There is a way in which the AI boom is different from previous technological advances. AI piggybacks on a world-wide effort.

The entire cumulative knowledge of mankind is used to train the AI LLMs. The chips, algorithms, networks, and everything else is a global combination of our best technology.

Another question sometimes raised, is what if AI LLMs fall into the wrong hands? The answer is that they have already fallen into the wrong hands. The leaders are Anthropic and Openai. They have made very little, and they are led by lunatics.