The tech-bro's are already losing $ billions on developing and investing in AI. There's no profitable revenue in AI at all, except they believe it will eventually become "free labor." Eventually every union in the US will be busted and rendered ineffective because AI will save the day.

Magical thinking....

We tax cigarettes to dissuade people from smoking. See nothing wrong with taxing AI to pressure companies from using it.

...we increase the tax 500, 600, 700%? (Trump logic/math)

I've been thinking about the need for a minimum national income, federal payments made directly to people, in light of the rise of not only AI, but robotics and automation. I couldn't remember the name of the guy who proposed it during his 2016 presidential campaign, but this Andrew Yang is the guy. Ahead of his time for sure, as his message just didn't resonate with people 10 years ago. His tax proposal is excellent. I hope we hear more from him.

People built it, it's all a sovereign wealth fund, people get payments from it. Trouble is there went incentive to work, innovation, at least from a money income standpoint. Work becomes intellectual prowess. Lord knows America has precious little of that in the general population.

When they have democracy ending money, they own too much.

We don't tax just to discourage. We tax to fund our society. We tax the income of workers under the theory that they are adding value and that added value is the fairest thing to tax.

With AI, it should be exactly the same thing, except that the AI and bots don't draw a salary. It is a stretch to tax the use of AI, bots and agents. But what makes perfect sense is to tax that value chain upstream at its origin.

For example, if a company sells a LLM solution to another company with the proposition that it will allow them to eliminate 40 customer support employees, then there should be a tax at the origin. The builder/seller of this tech should be taxed:
*** 40 employees X
*** useful life of the solution (10 years) X
*** Average salary of the displaced workers ($50,000) X
*** the normal income tax rate (say, an effective rate of 20%)

In other words, when selling this solution, either the seller or the buyer should be liable for a tax assessment of FOUR MILLION DOLLARS. In addition, the AI seller should be responsible for unemployment insurance, FICA and the other payroll taxes the displaced workers would have paid.

Why do I care one iota what this guy has to say?

DU has a now-retired "Primaries" forum that was dedicated to discussions about him back then (now archived/read-only) -

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=forum&id=1304

He also ran for Mayor of NYC in 2021 as a Democrat (the race that Eric Adams eventually won) and then decided to create his own party.

My apologies, I was being sarcastic but failed to put the emoticon in the post. I appreciate the effort in your reply though.

basically lumping him in oddballs like Marianne Williamson (and to some degree, Mike Gravel).

BUT... the one thing that he kept harping on - the "Universal Basic Income", seemed to hit home where the variation of that - the "Guaranteed Basic Income" has actually been pilot tested extensively in a number of locales recently and it seemed to work... at least for whatever period they ran the tests.

Nearly 30,000 Americans have received about $335 million in basic income. Here are 5 takeaways.

...I may forget again.

Wait for it.