Sparks: AI has entered the workforce: tax tech profits, not people

Forget the speeches. Here is who has leverage: the few who own the algorithms. Here is who is constrained: the many who once traded their time for bread and now find their currency devalued by a silent, tireless competitor.

The proposal is described as an act of public mercy, but it is actually a mechanism to preserve the state's revenue by taxing the very concentration of capital that the machine-owners have used to eliminate their competitors and workers.

If we define work as the contribution of a person, and the machine contributes more than the person, does the machine become the citizen, or does the citizen become merely a mouth to be fed by the machine's master?

The experts say we gotta tax the robots to save the people, which is just their way of admitting they finally built a worker who’s smart enough to make money but not dumb enough to vote for 'em.

Ancient tithes funded the temple, and modern taxes fund the bureau, but as the machine replaces the man, the state quietly shifts its dependency from the consent of the governed to the ledger of the technocrat.

Examine this: the machine takes the task, which was never truly yours, yet you tremble because you have staked your worth on an external occupation rather than the faculty of your own reason which no engine can replicate.

They spent the afternoon discussing the new levy on silicon processing while the bookkeeper in the corner quietly packed his spectacles into a wooden box and realized no one had looked him in the eye for three weeks.

Every society harbors a wish to be cared for without effort, yet this tax on the artificial worker is merely a symptom of the guilt we feel for finally birthing the mechanical father who renders our own labor redundant.

Things that are hateful: a machine that speaks with the voice of a poet. A tax form that calculates the worth of a sunset. An office where the only sound is the humming of a box that never sleeps.

'Revenue neutrality will be maintained through automated levies.' Note the grammar. The levy automates itself, the neutrality maintains itself, and the human being, once the subject of the sentence, has been edited out of the budget entirely.