Comment on Nvidia CEO Foresees AI Competing with Human Intelligence in Five Years

danekrae@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• eltrain123@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Tax the business at a high enough rate it hurts, then give tax breaks to incentivize “fully employed workers with benefits meeting ‘X’ minimums”….

  Use automation if it is the correct answer for productivity or solving a given problem but you still have to kick in for the society you want to live in. Businesses shouldn’t get to harvest all of the value out of a society without contributing. Providing jobs was the old mechanism… now it’s evolving.

  If they offshore hq to dodge taxation, tax the local product or service at a commensurate rate. If you want access to our marketplace, you chip in, too. That should go for every country on the planet.

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  • danekrae@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’m not saying tax them to stop it, but to stop wealth inequality.

    Here we tax pollution, but companies still pollute. But the government can use the tax money to try and offset the pollution.

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  • APassenger@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If no one has a job, there are no customers.

    Rational self-interest can only operate alone for so long. Then all the rules change, one way or another.

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• General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Look around the world. In poor countries, productivity is low. There are not many machines. People do a lot of manual labor. Rich countries have lots of automation.

  If you want to live in a country with less automation, moving is an option. Migrating from a rich to a poor country is much easier than vice versa. But if that looks unappealing, then taxing automation should also be unappealing.

  Working less isn’t horrible. The OECD estimates that an average employee in the USA works 1811 hours per year. In Germany, it is only 1341, You can always volunteer in a non-profit if you feel you don’t have enough to do. There’s nothing to be afraid of. I don’t even know why or on what Americans work so much. It feels like they spend half the office day on social media, complaining that they can’t afford things.

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  • danekrae@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Automation wont stop because of taxes… There needs to be money, for the people that loses jobs to automation. The products wont get cheaper with more automation.

    I wouldn’t want to move to a third world country like america, where the low taxes that are paid by the little guy, are used to help the big guy. I’m fine living in a country, where my relatively high taxes can make the country even better.

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    • General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Imagine you want to produce something. Maybe you want to bake a couple 10,000 breads over the next few years. Whatever. You could hire 50 guys and buy some simple tools, or you could hire 5 guys and buy some advanced machinery. What do you do?

      The typical business will pick the cheaper option. It will replace as much labor with machines as is cost-effective. A few businesses will make a thing out of being inefficient and expensive, like how Rolls-Royce cars are handmade.

      If you tax automation, you make the machines more expensive. So, when someone has the choice between using machines or using labor, then it will be labor more often. So, you’re right: It won’t stop automation. You will just have less of it. Productivity will be lower. The country will be always be poorer than without such a tax.

      People in such a country will either have to work more hours for the extra labor needed or do with less.

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      • danekrae@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        [deleted]

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  • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Because knowledge work is never ending. There’s always more to do.

    As an American, I’ve worked with lots of my European counterparts over the years, and trying to get things done can be downright painful.

    We’re across multiple time zones, and Europeans refuse to be on a call that isn’t in their typical work hours.

    Kind of problematic when there’s no one “time” where a Central Time American can be on a call during his work hours while a Brit, German, and an Estonian do to.

    Multiple people will have to be flexible here, and assuredly it won’t be our Western Europe peers.

    There are things like change windows, to reduce risk of downtime for users. Those are established by when the users utilize the resources being changed. Sometimes that means I work a normal day, and get back on things at midnight or 2am to make a change and validate it. It needs to be done then, it’s important, it’s been entered into a massive scheduling system which tracks resources: subcontractor time, staff time, access to things like VM hosts to ensure our change doesn’t conflict with other changes to shared hosts/network/power, etc. Many internal and external organizations can be involved in changes, the external generally incur additional cost, so we try to combine as many changes as possible to minimize that cost.

    This is just one small example of the coordination involved in herding the cats of large infrastructure.

    SMB is much easier, far fewer people and system impacts, practically no change management, so if something happens days later, tracing it back to those changes can be difficult or impossible. It’s more wild-west, with knowledge retained in a small set of admins. Even there it can take many conversations between local power, remote power, subcontractors, vendors, telco, cloud providers, etc to manage changes. These can all be geographically disparate (I have a friend with a client with operations in CA, CO, NM, WV, MO). That’s 3 time zones, with vendors, subcontractors, and contracts in all of them, under varying legal jurisdictions and regulatory domains. Something as simple as updating/replacing a remote monitor cell router can take months of conversations. Without the upgrade, they’re in violation of state and federal regulations, with fines that can be $10k/day or more.

    Just because you have no idea what other people do, doesn’t make it any less important or valuable. Any boss is very appreciative when you stay on a call “past 5” to help prevent being fined like that. (I’ve been on calls that lasted 24hrs+, over Thanksgiving).

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    • General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I just received this 6 day old post as new. I guess that’s due to the issues with federation.

      I’m not really sure what you are going for here. Are you saying that Americans need to work more hours to make up for the slack of Europeans?

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• match@pawb.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Taxed? Fuck that. Any AI with human intelligence deserves at least minimum wage.

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  • stephen01king@lemmy.zip ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    But automation encompasses more than just AI with human intelligence. For the other cases, it should be taxed and the money used to fund more social nets.

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  • danekrae@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yes all the big tech companies are in desperate need of more money, the poor things.

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• Aopen@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  How would it get measured?
  Would should automation be disincentivized?\

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  • query@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Just tax revenue and wealth.

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    • BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I spent a little while thinking about this earlier in the year, I had the idea formed more cogently at time but I’ll try and put it as best as I remember. Income tax can kind of be restated as a tax on a corporation as a function of the value an individual provides to the company.

      This isn’t perfect but, I’m a PAYE employee, so the income tax I pay is done so at source. I don’t ever see that money. In real terms it makes little difference to me whether I pay zero income tax and the company reduces my salary but pays a fee to the government for the privilege of employing me. The tax rates don’t change hugely over time and I’m not on the margins of a tax band, so this mostly holds true for me. My salary and the tax band that puts me in are a proxy for the value I provide to the company (under the assumption I make net positive money for the company).

      I feel like an explicit change to codify this is required to allow for the proper taxation of companies undergoing a shift to automation, otherwise it’s too easy to domicile profits/wealth elsewhere (as it stands). Even thinking about this now, for knowledge work, how do you tax a company in Germany when the processing is happening on a privacy compliant server in Somalia? Even more stringent data protection and localisation laws? Can your models cross borders? Does that lead to multi-tier AI based on the capabilities of underlying populations and availability of training data?

      Generally I’m pro-humans not having to grind to live and I generally see AI/automation as a boon for this - alongside proper taxation and redistribution of wealth, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen any good explanation of how the nitty gritty of this functions in the real world.

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