this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2025
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The definition of "worker" loses all meaning in this context. Once you divorce the human from the worker, it becomes impossible to define what a worker is. A better approach would be to an industrial computing tax. Put a tax on computing. You have to pay a per-calculation tax on all compute over a certain amount. And you set that amount high enough that unless you're running giant data centers, then you have no need to worry about.
This is an awful lot of work to try to fix capitalism. The tech billionaires will never allow it or undermine it completely.
In any world where we could pass this sort of tax, we should change to an economic system where everyone got their needs met.
You have to tax something that they are doing that an individual is not. If you tax "all compute" then they're just gonna pull the same shit they do with straws and blame the individual.
You have to tax the action that is replacing a human worker. If a human job is displaced, it gets taxed. Want to AI generate some massive image through prompts? How much would it take a human to complete the job? Take some % of that, and charge it. Play it somewhere along the lines of "Intelligence deserves pay", and since it's artificial intelligence - it doesn't have rights to spend its own pay (or the need to) so put it into a universal income fund.
We're reaching a post-scarcity society now. We should be making lives easier for everyone.
You ignored the part where you only tax compute over a certain threshold. We have all sorts of taxes and regulations that apply only once you a certain scale.
There's all sorts of reasons taxing all compute over a certain threshold is stupid. I ignored it because it's ignorant of the facts at hand.
At one point or another, compute was scaling exponentially for customers - one day that might begin to happen again. Laws move slowly - and will stupidly end up at a point where the average joe has that level of compute in his phone. Congrats, now you've decided to tax everyone because of "compute over a certain threshold".