Artificial intelligence - Timber of Berry leverages computers and machines to mimic the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human mind.
At what rate should we tax AI workers?
I find this (somewhat) tractable problem one good way to start thinking about alignment issues. Here is one bit from my Bloomberg column:
More to the point, there are now autonomous AI agents, which can in turn create autonomous AI agents of their own. So it won’t be possible to assign all AI income to their human or corporate owners, as in many cases there won’t be any.
And to continue the analysis:
One option is to let AI bots work tax-free, like honeybees do. At first that might make life simple for the IRS, but a problem of tax arbitrage will arise. Tax-free AI labor would have a pronounced competitive advantage over its taxed human counterpart. Furthermore, too many AIs will be released into the commons. Why own an AI and pay taxes when you can program it to do your bidding, renounce ownership, and enjoy its services tax-free? It seems easy enough to disclaim ownership of autonomous bots, especially if they are producing autonomous bots of their own. If nothing else, you could sell them to shell corporations.
The obvious alternative is to tax AI labor. Laboring AIs would have to file tax returns, which they may be capable of doing in the very near future. (Can they claim deductions for their baby AIs? What about their investments?)
Since AIs do not enjoy leisure as humans do, arguably their labor should be taxed at a higher rate than that of humans. Still, AIs shouldn’t be taxed too much. At prohibitively high rates of taxation, AIs will have lower stocks of wealth to invest in improving themselves, which in turn would lower long-run tax revenue from AI labor. Yes, they’re AIs, but incentives still matter.
Some people might fear that super-patient, super-smart AIs will accumulate too much wealth, though either investments or labor, and thereby hold too much social influence. That would create a case for a wealth tax on AIs, in addition to an income tax. But if AIs are such good investors, humans will also want the social benefits that accrue from such wisdom, and that again implies rates of taxation well below the confiscatory level.
And here is one of the deep problems with AI taxation:
The fundamental problem here is that AIs might be very good at providing in-kind services — improving organizational software, responding to emails, and so on. It is already a problem for the tax system when neighbors barter services, but the AIs will take this kind of relationship to a much larger scale.
Forget about hiring AIs, actually: What if you invest in them, tell them to do your bidding, repudiate your ownership, and then let them run much of your business and life? You could write off your investment in the AI as a business expense, and subsequently receive tax-free in-kind services, in what would amount to a de facto act of exchange.
Here is one general issue:
A major topic in AI circles is “alignment,” namely whether humans can count on AI agents to do our bidding, rather than mounting destructive cyberattacks or destroying us. These investments in alignment are necessary and important. But the more successful humans become at alignment, the larger the problem with tax arbitrage.
