A token tax could reduce the tax advantage of machine labor

Transcript

From the transcript Odd Lots publishes with the episode.

1. 50:34

   Yeah. Well, so there's a few different things, right? I think A, we're talking about the safety, regulatory safety concerns of these things. There's the societal concerns also. We have to get through the safety thing. for the societal things to actually matter. But this society is about to go through this massive disruption that could play out in different ways. But man, if we don't prepare, right, it's a little bit like, let's say, whether it's the industrial revolution, do that in five years instead of in a hundred years.

2. 51:05

   And that shook the world, right? You get communism, fascism, all these things, because all of a sudden one world order is a new one comes, right? And while it, I think it's arguable whether you'll have, humans will have less to do, et cetera. But I think there's at least a reasonable chance. And certainly the jobs will change. I believe in three years, 14% of current jobs will be radically changed. People are going to change. So again, and we just experienced this with WTO. If China coming on has just like a source of labor, you create a new source of labor, it's disruptive. That's why we end up with populism and Trump and all these things.

3. 51:42

   The world was disrupted in certain ways. And you get populism around the world as a reaction to that. AIs can create, accelerate those trends if we don't think about how to get in front of it. And so you need to think about how to get in front of it. One thing that's obvious, right? It's minimal. It's not, I think some of the other things you're talking about, tax and wealth and other things are also part of the solution.

4. 52:03

   But one thing that's obvious is you shouldn't be putting human labor at a disadvantage to machine labor. And it is today. We tax human labor. That's a disincentive. Whatever you tax, you're disincentivizing. You tax tariff. goods, you're disincentivizing importing foreign goods, you tax labor, human labor, and not machine labor. You are disincentivizing one versus the other. Why are we doing that? We certainly don't want, if it's like equal, there's negative consequences to have a machine do something and human not in terms of the externalities of what ends up happening to the humans if you do that.

5. 52:38

   So A, I think a token tax, a machine labor tax, whatever you want to call it, and we could get into, I think we could get to the mechanics. But you can measure how much work the machine is doing. If a company's hiring as a worker, it should at least pay taxes proportionate to income taxes that humans pay, or else you're prioritizing machine labor over human labor. I wouldn't do that. I think it's a good source of revenue.

6. 53:02

   I think you should get going on that. I think it's obviously also politically salient. Who's going to argue we should incentivize machine labor over human labor? Who's in favor of that? So I think it'll work. It's a tax that can pass. I think you can buy it. Republicans and Democrats agreeing on that tax. There's a lot of other complications with everything else you're throwing out of theoretical.

7. 53:22

   I think this will work. I believe in the interest that we're getting from both sides of the aisle on this is real. I think this can actually happen. And it's a matter of like treating human work as something that's important. Like, and you could use this tax to lower human, to make it incentivize human labor over machine labor. Those all seem like really important goals. And you definitely don't want to have, and I think you likely will take this new chunk of people that have a lot of college debt, et cetera, say, okay, you don't have jobs.

8. 53:50

   And by the way, AI is taking these jobs and we're not even taxing the AI. Like that feels like a crazy path to be on and we can fix that path.