Should Artificial Intelligence Pay Taxes?
Ryan Benjamin Abbott · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020
The tax system incentivizes automation, even in cases where it is not otherwise efficient. This is because the vast majority of tax revenue is derived from labor income. When an AI replaces a person, the government loses a substantial amount of tax revenue - potentially hundreds of billions of dollars a year in the aggregate. All of this is the unintended result of a system designed to tax labor rather than capital. Such a system no longer works once labor is capital. Robots are not good taxpayers. The solution is to change the tax system to be more neutral between AI and human workers and to limit automation’s impact on tax revenue. This would be best achieved by reducing taxes on human workers and increasing corporate and capital taxes.