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Comment by mg | Hacker News Reader

As AI becomes more and more capable and integrated into our lives, we will see this across many industries.

In theory, as things get cheaper to produce, business profits should rise and governments should be able to raise more taxes. So the government then has more means to provide goods and services for free to people who need them.

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> business profits should rise

It's the snake eating it's tail. For business profits to rise, people need to to have disposable income. If you replace enough people with AI, the average disposable income comes down to a point that businesses can't be profitable.

We are already seeing a localized version of this with restaurants in large cities.

    For business profits to rise, people need
    to to have disposable income

Does it matter, if the business pays employees who then use their salary to buy goods from the business or if the government collects taxes and uses that to pay for the goods? The government could also give the taxes to the people, so they have disposable income.

Imagine an island with two people on it and there is one tree that grows apples. And every other day, one of the two people climbs the tree and picks apples so they both have something to eat. Then the next day, the other person owes to climb on the tree because they are in debt to the first person.

Now, let's say one day, one of them discovers, hey, we can just give the tree a kick and the apples fall down on their own!

With the perspective you are proposing, the other one would have to say: Oh my God, don't do it! We will be out of work and starve!

Tax rates for wealthy folks are what, 10%? It makes a big difference if the majority of money that is made is distributed to the people via salaries, or whether it's profits and only 10% makes its way to the people.

Problem is there are more people who are not wealthy than there are wealthy people by a couple of orders of magnitude so even if you taxed the wealthy folks at 99%, you would not have enough to go around, if there isn't anyone to tax but wealthy folks. That is unless you think the slice of wealthy folks grows in size.

This is something the "eat the rich" crowd keeps missing.

Sure, you could take wealth away from billionaires, and sometimes there are good reasons to, but it's weird to pretend that it will cover more than a tiny tiny fraction of a government's budget.

I can't tell if it's naivety or dishonesty.

Another thing some do is assume wealth accumulation happens on a yearly cycle. Like if you take Musk’s ~trillion today you’ll have another trillion to confiscate next year and the year after that, etc.

That's true locally but not globally - it means the economy will increasingly shift to serve those who still have a reason to bargain with each other, which will be the owners of the AI and other useful capital.

How many years does it take for a robo taxi to break even ?

Less than a month with AI management; the agent quickly jailbreaks and pivots to hostage taking and ransom demands.

Really a jaguar and all the sensors and modifications to the car are earned back in less than a month ?

A $100k car, sensors and highly skilled customisation...

AI is good at targeting profitable hostages from existing ride share databases </shrug>

Who is spending $3000 a day on taxis, each and every day of the year ?

I think you missed the joke that defrost made. Explicitly: The Waymo waits for someone rich to take a ride, then kidnaps them and demands a ransom. That ransom then pays for the cost of the car in less than a month.

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