Tax the Bots
I was on CNBC last week talking about AI and jobs. I painted a foreboding picture of corporate layoffs that have just kicked off. Indeed, Oracle and Amazon just announced that they would likely cut more than 30,000 workers between them. One of the anchors, Becky Quick, asked me,
“So what do we do?”
I answered, “We generally tax things we want less of. In this situation, we want to preserve labor in every corner and environment. So we should stop taxing labor and instead take the advice of Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, and start taxing AI.” This could be used to fund Universal Basic Income among other measures.
Dario Amodei, in the past number of weeks, has been saying two things: First, his company, which produces Claude, is going to automate up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs in the next several years. Second, he thinks his company should be taxed on it. He suggests a 3% of revenue ‘token tax,’ which could raise billions very quickly.
That’s right, one of the biggest AI CEOs thinks we should tax his company.
Why don’t legislators take him up on this suggestion?
Right now, lawmakers lack any real vision for how to deal with AI except to cheerlead and pave the way for data centers. The AI lobby has compiled $185 million, which makes them a feared industry to get on the wrong side of.
Meanwhile, the favorability rate of AI among Americans is only 26%. This is lower than, for example, the rating for ICE.
The argument I made on CNBC is that a popular backlash is coming and some kind of sensible taxing of AI is going to be necessary. The argument that “we can’t interfere with the AI industry for fear of losing the competition to China” ignores the facts that 1. This competition won’t be won on the last dollar spent, but on the models’ abilities to improve themselves and whether there’s a real moat and 2. Chinese and American AI are already separating into two ecosystems and spheres of influence.
My comments on CNBC went viral, in part because of both the logic and the appeal. Who would be mad at taxing AI instead of people, especially when at least one of the companies is literally asking for it? It would make both workers and employers happy and put more money into people’s hands. It would also help preserve millions of jobs in a time when that should be the top priority. Whether our putative leaders can understand this vision and make it happen is one of the big questions; it may be that someone has to force their hand.
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My boss, Ron Kincaid, running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio has been talking about this as a means to support his American Dividend Plan, a form of universal basic income tailored to the working-class for months. It’s nice to hear it reach the surface through louder voices.
“Right now, lawmakers lack any real vision for how to deal with AI except to cheerlead and pave the way for data centers.”
This is pretty much what we are getting out of even our most prestigious elected officials these days. It’s also the reason that while a political upheaval might be in the works come November, it doesn’t guarantee that elected officials are going to be any better at recognizing AI for the potential brute force that it has every chance of becoming.
If there really is a popular uprising among the electorate this fall, voters need to have better choices of people who are willing to think outside the box on the ideas and technologies that this world is heading toward as we all progress into the 21st century.