Time to Tax the Robots

In Time to Tax the Robots, the author, George Randolph Dirth, takes on the arrival of the AI revolution, its impact on the American economy, our workforce and its implications for our tax revenue. He quickly concludes that due to our weakened fiscal status, our high level of demographic uncertainty and the potential for significant job dislocation, it is necessary to implement taxation of AI, now. His analysis suggests that the AI-era presents a period of inflection, from which we are likely to emerge with a high productivity-low tax revenue economy, which may struggle to fund basic government services, and further exacerbate our fiscal weakness.

He explains how the Arc of the Production Function-depicting the evolution in contributions to output of labor, capital, technology and now AI-has significantly changed in the post WW2 era, while our taxation mechanism has increased taxes on the individual while their share of income has decreased. This grand divergence-between the recipients of income and their share of taxation-unlocks the understanding of not just how our public debt has ballooned, but also how income inequality--also known as our affordability crisis--has emerged as a socially destructive and divisive force.

Finally, since we compete in a global marketplace, he offers an update on Chinese AI models' increasingly substantial gains in U.S. market share - much of it built on a specific alternative

model architecture, originally published by American researchers in 2017.