AI Taxation

The rise of the generative artificial intelligence has revived an old debate around machinism, or the use of tools and machines to increase worker productivity; a concept that has always had a significant impact on the social and economic theory. However, with the advent of this new generation of digital technologies, this concept takes on a new dimension.

While they can offer enormous potential for increasing productivity and reducing costs, it also raises important questions and concerns around employment, skills and fairness.

Combined with the challenge of aging populations, the labor shortage in certain sectors of activity, and a growing gap between initial training and the skills required, and you get an explosive cocktail for our social financing and taxation model.

This may be a good time to rediscover the Swiss economist Jean de Sismondi. He is often seen as an ?early? communist thinker; he was opposed to technology and manufacturers, as he considered more industry creates more social exploitation, and increased the gap between the value of what labor produces and the remuneration it receives.

In his works from two centuries ago, he theorized also a shift towards mechanization, and proposed and proposed a form of financial compensation for each job replaced by a machine.

In other terms, a productivity tax on automation. This has been debated for some years in the European Parliament and in the member states, in order to establish a taxing regime for heavy users of IA, so they would contribute to a fairer share of our social security system financing.

This sounds a social and ethical proposal, but will also depend on how we qualify the artificial intelligence, or other digital tools, that should be taxed; and how we quantify the level of contribution, in order not to discourage investment risk and innovation, that also contribute to our well-being and democratic society.

As we are today getting fiscal incentives and corporate rewards for digitalization and automation of process, this will be a major shift of our fiscal approach, and we will both philosophical and economical debate between supporters and opponents of this concept. But this is a debate that we will not escape any longer, whether for those who want to preserve our social system or to reform it.

#economy #technology #employment