cross-posted from: https://lemmy.intai.tech/post/43759
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/949452
OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Sam Altman are in massive trouble. OpenAI is getting sued in the US for illegally using content from the internet to train their LLM or large language models
So we can sue robots but when I ask if we can tax them, and reduce human working hours, I’m the crazy one?
… No?
What would you tax exactly? Robots don’t earn an income and don’t inherently make a profit. You could tax a company or owner who profits off of robots and/or sells their labor.
It would have to be some sort of moderated labor cost saving tax kind of thing enforced by the government
Should we tax bulldozers because they take away jobs from people using shovels? What about farm equipment, since they take away jobs from people picking fruit by hand? What about mining equipment, because they take away jobs from people using pickaxes?
If the machine replaced the human, yes. That’s the argument being made currently.
Imagine if we simply taxed machine profits after 40 hours of work. You not only can give kickbacks to large companies, but you could also rewire profits to UBI
If we think of production as costing land, labour and capital, then more efficient methods of production would likely swap labour for capital. In that case then we just tax capital growth like we’re doing now (Only properly, like without the loopholes). No need to complicate it past that
I’m not sure how feasible it is but I’ve seen a sort of “minimum wage” for robots suggested which is paid to the government as tax.
What would be the legal argument for this? I’m not against it but I don’t know how it could be argued.
It could be argued that when our tax code, laws, and constitution were created there weren’t AIs taking jobs and funneling the economy to only a few people breaking the system and it’s time for us to adapt as a society. But I know adapting isn’t a strength of our legal system.
Also, you wouldn’t be suing the AI as it’s own entity. You would be suing the creator/owner that is allowing it to steal people’s content. AI is not to the point it is sentient and responsible for it’s own actions.
That’s actually a great argument: an AI is trained without permission on the result of people’s labor, and is thus able to intercept the need for this labor and take away financial opportunities derived thereof. Therefore, An AI’s labor and its profit could be argued to contain, in the percentage that an AI is the content of its training, a portion that is proportionately belonging to those who did this labor its obscure process is based on. Therefore, an AI’s master should take a portion of its revenue as royalties and distribute them to the “people’s council” which in this case is just the government, for it to redistributed accordingly.
i.e. tax the fuck out of the owners, and minimum basic income for all. Completing the economic circle of life.
I’m no expert on law but maybe something about AI unethically taking our jobs away
What makes it unethical? How is it different from advancements in technology taking away any other job, like elevator operators, numerous factory positions, calculators (the human kind), telephone operators, people who sew clothes (somewhat), and so on?
It seems to me that automating away jobs has historically bettered humanity. Why would we want a job to be done by a person when we can have a machine do it (assuming a machine does equal or better)? We can better focus people on other jobs and eventually, hopefully, with no mandatory need for a job at all.
Lol, as if. Look at wages:productivity since the 70s
China didn’t take your job and neither will AI. Corporations will replace you for something that cost less.
We can’t really legislate against AI because other countries won’t. Its also a huge boon for society, we just have to make sure the profits are redistributed and work hours overall are reduced instead of all the productivity gain going into the pockets of the mega wealthy
I’m not sure that people want to legislate against AI as much as they want to find a way to legislate for the fair outcomes associated with AI productivity. The challenge is that is harder to do. In the USA we can’t get out of our own way to properly tax corporations, nevermind have a more complex solution like reduce worker hours, increase PTO based upon improved societal output. In the absence of a complex but comprehensive solution (which I don’t think we have the capability to pull off) people are desperate and saying things like “let’s hold back on AI will we can put together this mythical great plan”. We’re never going to get the great plan though. Hopefully I’m just cynical but I don’t see a path (at least for the US as I can’t speak for the rest of the world) that doesn’t continue towards dystopia.
Legal basis for suing a company that uses another company’s product/creations without approval seems like a fairly pretty straightforward intellectual property issue.
Legal basis for increased taxes on revenue from AI or automation in general could be created in the same way that any tax is created: through legislation. Income tax didn’t exist before, now it does. Tax breaks for mortgage interest didn’t use it exist, now it does. Levying higher taxes on companies that rely heavily on automated systems and creating a UBI out of the revenue might not exist right now, but it can, if the right people are voted in to pass the right laws.