New York Times DealBook, The A.I. Token Tax:
When Bill Gates warned of the dangers posed by A.I. this week, he also weighed in on a somewhat obscure debate among politicians and economists about the best way to tax the technology. Gates suggested taxing A.I. tokens.
This month, Representative Greg Casar of Texas, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, proposed a bill that would create such a tax. DealBook spoke with him about the plan and how A.I. has become a hot political topic.
At a basic level, how would it work?
We have two measurements of how much A.I. companies are selling. One is the tokens, which is the unit of measure they currently use to sell A.I. The other is revenue on A.I. sales. And to prevent them from gaming the system by rapidly changing the definition of a token, we tax the higher of those two.
The tax starts out quite low, when we don’t have A.I. mass unemployment, and then ramps up if A.I. starts to cause significant job loss. …
Many economists have argued that taxing an input to businesses, their A.I. tokens, is less efficient than raising corporate taxes, which would still allow companies to maximize their profits with A.I. before taxing them. Why is a token tax the best way?
By taxing A.I. directly, we tax something that would grow as unemployment grows, so we’re tying the solution to the problem.
If companies are using more A.I., we’re able to fund more and more jobs. Corporate profits could be related or unrelated to the A.I. itself.
Why funnel the tax income to support a new Work Protection Administration, which would fund new jobs, rather than broadly distribute the funds, which is favored by proposals from Senator Bernie Sanders and others?
I find a small universal basic income for everyone dystopic. Americans want to contribute. We want Americans to still be at work and still have a job.
I’ve been discouraged by the sole focus on job training as the response to mass unemployment. That would be like offering swimming lessons on the Titanic.
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