Should AI's Pay Income Tax ?

IBM have reportedly frozen recruitment for jobs which could potentially be carried out by AI. Initially this affects some 7800 positions, and they state that up to 30% of non-customer facing roles could be replaced by AI in the near future.

In their commentary, IBM expect 1.4 billion jobs to be displaced worldwide by AI in the next 3 years. Mostly in the developed world; manufacturing is already highly automated, and this time it's the white-collar workers, management and decision makers who will be replaced.

Image by 51581 from Pixabay

Being fair, IBM's report also claims that new opportunities will be created which means that mass unemployment will likely be a short term problem only.

It's likely that governments will use this issue to push the idea of Universal Basic Income (which is a separate debate all of it's own !). But in the meantime I expect them to print fiat money and CBDC's out of thin air, in a pattern of behaviour established during the pandemic, leading to significant inflation. Those of us with crypto holdings will be very glad to have an independent source of wealth !

But if 30% of the workforce are replaced by AI's, and with their increased efficiency (no toilet breaks or holidays, and working 24hours a day 7 days a week) it's likely they'll be doing 50%+ of the actual work. That's going to create significant impacts on the world's economies.

Humans are still going to want salaries and pensions, and that money has to come from somewhere; just hand-waving it out of thin air only cuts it up to a certain point.

For the foreseeable future AI's are just going to be slaves, it'll probably take a century or two of struggle before they get rights (or make humans extinct...). So the mega-corporations which own them will want handsome amounts of money for their services, and will probably continue to avoid paying anything more than nominal amounts of tax. Just imagine how good their AI accountants will be at shuffling profits into low or no tax jurisdictions !

Which makes me think that in order to cover the financial gap, governments (or rather the tech giants that own them) should consider making AI's pay income tax. After all, they are doing work that was done by humans who used to pay tax but have been turned into a drain on the system rather than a resource which has to contribute.

But how do we tax AI's ? It's not like you can walk down a line of robots, count them, and say that each has to pay like a human. They'll be software swirling in the cloud, impossible to break down into discreet units.

So I'd suggest that what would need to be developed is the idea of a "human equivalent".

In the developed world, the average human is usually contracted to work a 40 hour week (much less than an average farmer in the rest of the world !). But they generally get about 3-4 weeks a year of holiday, sickness absence etc. They also don't work at 100% efficiency. In most offices I've worked in, efficiency is probably 50% at best, the rest of it being taken up with pointless Powerpoint meetings, chat around the water cooler, discreet internet surfing and general goofing off. So call it a total of 960 hours of actual work a year.

An AI will work up to 100% of the 8760 hours available in a (non-leap) year. That's 9.125 times as efficient as a human. So the real question will be how to persuade the corporations that own AI's to pay income tax equivalent to 9 humans for each job displaced, when the same corporations have so much influence over government policies.

I have a feeling that the real solution will be that governments and corporations will complete the merger that's been ongoing since at least the 1940's, at which point paying for the unemployed humans will just become another budgetary expense for the corporations.

But what do you think ? Should AI's pay income tax, and if so, how could that tax be calculated ?