Tax Geek

• Tax Geek 19 Nov 2025 14:09 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: jikifo5403’s comment on: How gov­ern­ments might re­spond to the eco­nomic up­heaval of TAI

  Thank you! Appreciate the feedback :)

• Tax Geek 14 Nov 2025 12:27 UTC

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Is “AI as Nor­mal Tech­nol­ogy” a mis­nomer?

  Yes, I think “AI as normal technology” is probably a misnomer—or at least very liable to being misinterpreted. Perhaps this later post by the authors is helpful—they clarify they don’t mean “mundane or predictable” when they say “normal”.

  But I’m not sure a world where human CEOs defer a lot of decisions, including high-level strategy, to AI requires something that is approximately AGI. Couldn’t we also see this happen in a world with very narrow but intelligent “Tool AI” systems? In other words, CEOs could be deferring a lot of decisions “to AI”, but to many different AI systems, each of which has relatively narrow competencies. This might depend on your view of how narrow or general a skill “high-level strategy” is.

  From the Asterisk interview you linked, it doesn’t sound like Arvind is expecting AI to remain like narrow and tool-like forever. Just that he expects it will take longer to reach AGI than people expect, and only after AIs are used extensively in the real world. He admits he would significantly change his evaluation if we saw a fairly general-purpose personal assistant work out of the box in 2025-26.

• Tax Geek 25 Oct 2025 12:50 UTC

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Karthik Tadepalli’s comment on: My EA Senescence

  I sort of see where both criticisms are coming from. The lowest-common-denominator, community-related posts get the highest engagement (including from people like the OP) because they require little context. The high context technical stuff is much harder to parse, and necessarily has a smaller audience, so gets less engagement (perhaps with the exception for AI Safety, which is currently experiencing a “boom”).

  There will naturally be fewer technical posts in the areas I’m interested in and, like Michael_PJ, I have no desire to read long technical posts in areas I’m not interested in, so I end up engaging disproportionately with community-related posts.

  Fiddling with the forum filters helps—I personally have downweighted posts tagged “Community” and “Building effective altruism”—but I suspect few people do this.

• Tax Geek 25 Oct 2025 12:12 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Dušan D. Nešić (Dushan)’s comment on: How I ex­pect TAI to im­pact de­vel­op­ing countries

  Hi Dushan. I cover this at a high level under “But impacts will be uneven” heading. I agree with you that countries in the supply chain will benefit and others less so.

• Tax Geek 20 Oct 2025 7:57 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jack_S🔸’s comment on: How I ex­pect TAI to im­pact de­vel­op­ing countries

  Thank you! Yes, totally fair point. I am not trained in development economics so was very uncertain about this post, and expected there to be large differences between countries that I wouldn’t pick up. It’s disappointing to hear that the development econ mainstream has not been engaging with this topic.

  I had in mind the lower-income countries (mostly in Africa) when writing most of this. Your point about how, without TAI, these countries might be able to develop export industries and climb the development ladder is an interesting one. I had thought of that briefly, but was unsure how likely that was to happen, given we haven’t seen any African country do it yet (to my knowledge). But perhaps it’s just something that takes time and can only really happen after the middle-income countries become rich.

• Tax Geek 20 Oct 2025 7:45 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Denkenberger🔸’s comment on: How I ex­pect TAI to im­pact de­vel­op­ing countries

  AI agrees with you on cars and yachts, but says the majority of TVs, gaming rigs, and bikes consumed in HICs are made in LMICs.

  Fair enough. I think most of these are made in Asia and I do expect Asia (particularly China) to fare better than most other LMICs or developing countries.

• Tax Geek 20 Oct 2025 7:30 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Denkenberger🔸’s comment on: How gov­ern­ments might re­spond to the eco­nomic up­heaval of TAI

  I should note that “transfers” is not limited to unemployment benefits. For OECD governments, the biggest class of transfer by far is currently public pensions.

  There are all sorts of good reasons why the elderly should be happy with lower public pensions (elderly poverty rates tend to be lower than for children or working-age adults, life expectancy has increased far more than retirement ages have). But that still doesn’t happen for political economy reasons. Perhaps that will change with TAI—the elderly tend to own more capital so they should see massive returns in general. Maybe they’ll be happy with <10x pension increases even as wages increase 10x. I just wouldn’t take that for granted.

  Agree 100% that governments would need to tap into capital gains somehow, or capital more broadly. I also like that Capital dividend fund idea—thanks for sharing.

• Tax Geek 19 Oct 2025 10:49 UTC

  1 point

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  on: A Plau­si­ble AI Eco­nomic Scenario

  Thanks for the post! I share much of the concerns you raise, particularly your conclusion that benefits of AI will not be distributed equitably through natural market mechanisms.

  There will still exist a sizable gap between the development of these systems and their diffusion into the broader economy, but this gap will be on the order of years, not decades.

  I am curious about why you think this. And by “the broader economy” are you talking about the global economy or only the US? I don’t have any firm views on speed of diffusion but I find decades plausible, at least when it comes to the global economy. Especially if diffusion involves widespread deployment of robotics.

• Tax Geek 19 Oct 2025 9:45 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Denkenberger🔸’s comment on: How gov­ern­ments might re­spond to the eco­nomic up­heaval of TAI

  Thanks. I’m a bit sceptical of that 10x estimate and will have a closer look at that paper.

  However, even assuming wages for non-automatable roles goes up ~10x before full automation, that won’t help governments if their costs rise more than 10x. In developed countries, government costs mostly consist of social protection transfers and wages themselves. In the case where wages rise 10x, transfers could rise more than 10x if (1) transfers are linked to wages (which they often are); and/​or (2) the share of people receiving transfers rises (because unemployment rises).

  It is possible that transfers could be de-linked from wages somewhat, but political economy can make that difficult and, to the extent that people’s welfare depends on the parts of the economy that are not rapidly growing (e.g. healthcare, housing, childcare), that could have negative welfare impacts.

  So I’m not saying governments are doomed—as I point out, TAI should be creating value and the challenge is ultimately one of distribution. But governments still have to worry about revenue, because it’s not the size of GDP that matters so much as the composition of government income and spending.

• Tax Geek 19 Oct 2025 8:07 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Denkenberger🔸’s comment on: How I ex­pect TAI to im­pact de­vel­op­ing countries

  Thanks for the feedback and you raise some interesting points.

  the demand for manual labor will increase dramatically, because the people making a lot of money from AI will want bigger houses, more roads, and more physical goods in general

  I’m not sure about this. I think we have different intuitions on how broad the class of “people making a lot of money from AI” vs how broad the class of knowledge workers losing out from TAI. My sense is that the former will be smaller than the latter, just based on data I’ve seen showing how little most people in developed countries have saved for retirement in the form of financial assets like shares (i.e. I haven’t researched this, and it likely depends on the country).

  I guess this will also depend on the specific capabilities of TAI and how much labour it will displace.

  I appreciate this challenge and it would be good to see some modelling on it (I might have a quick go at some stage).

  Some of the production of goods will be done in the HICs (perhaps increasing remittances), but I think a lot will be done in LMICs, which would a boon for those countries.

  Interesting point. Some of the goods you mention people getting rich from AI will want are bigger houses and roads. These are not globally traded so, to the extent TAI increases demand for construction work, I would expect this demand to increase in HICs rather than LMICs.

  To the extent that people getting rich from AI want to increase their consumption, I expect much of that will be channelled through higher demand for in-person services—e.g. personal chef, gardener, masseusse, and (as you point out) construction.

  Some increased consumption might also be channeled through physical goods, but physical goods are already incredibly cheap relative to incomes in HICs. The main bottlenecks to consumption are likely to be physical space (your house needs to be big enough for your toys) and leisure time. I expect TAI could remove the leisure time bottleneck for existing capitalholders, which could boost demand for leisure complements. But there is still only so much time in the day, and many higher-tech leisure goods like TVs, gaming rigs, bikes, cars, yachts don’t rely much on LMIC labour anyway. (Some things like clothing and tents may be more exceptions.)

  I do agree with you that some LMICs could see a boon—but I don’t expect this effect to be widespread across LMICs in general.

  Also, in this scenario, government revenue would be large because they would be taxing the high wages of manual workers, and taxing massive corporate/​capital gains.

  I disagree with this because most governments tax labour more heavily than capital. So if all the income currently earned by labour just shifts to capital, all else equal tax revenues will decline. (At the same time government spending will likely have to increase to pay for increased unemployment. I go into this more here.)

  If governments are able to shift their tax bases towards capital we might see tax revenues remain stable.^[1] But there are major challenges to taxing capital: capital is mobile and more easily hidden, there are serious valuation issues when you try to tax unrealised gains^[2], and it is distortionary because it is very hard to properly account for inflation. Plus there are a bunch of political challenges. All these challenges are why tax bases rely more heavily on labour to begin with.

  1. ^

     I find it highly unlikely tax revenues would increase in the near term.

  2. ^

     Most countries tax realised gains instead, but this leads to undertaxation because taxpayers can choose when to realise those gains, which is usually only when they need to fund personal consumption. There are also tax avoidance opportunities and distortionary lock-in effects that crop up when taxpayers can choose when to realise their gains—which is part of why capital is almost always taxed at flat rates rather than on a progressive schedule.

• Tax Geek 18 Oct 2025 9:12 UTC

  4 points

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  on: AI Safety Has a Very Par­tic­u­lar Worldview

  Thanks for this post. As someone who has only recently started exploring the field of AI safety, much of this resonates with my initial impressions. I would be interested to hear the counterpoints from those who have Disagree-voted on this post.

  Do you think the “very particular worldview” you describe is found equally among those working on technical AI safety and AI governance/​policy? My impression is that policy inherently requires thinking through concrete pathways of how AGI would lead to actual harm as well as greater engagement with people outside of AI safety.

  I have also noticed a split between the “superintelligence will kill us all” worldview (which you seem to be describing) and “regardless of whether superintelligence kills us all, AGI/​TAI will be very disruptive and we need to manage those risks” (which seemed to be more along the lines of the Will MacAskill post you linked to—especially as he talks about directing people to causes other than technical safety or safety governance). Both of these worldviews seem prominent in EA. I haven’t gotten the impression that the superintelligence worldview is stronger, but perhaps I just haven’t gotten deep enough into AI safety circles yet.

How I ex­pect TAI to im­pact de­vel­op­ing countries

How gov­ern­ments might re­spond to the eco­nomic up­heaval of TAI

• Tax Geek 16 Oct 2025 10:40 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Lizka’s comment on: A per­sonal take on why you should work at Forethought (maybe)

  On the “AI as normal technology” perspective—I don’t think it involves a strong belief that AI won’t change the world much. The authors restate their thesis in a later post:

  There is a long causal chain between AI capability increases and societal impact. Benefits and risks are realized when AI is deployed, not when it is developed. This gives us (individuals, organizations, institutions, policymakers) many points of leverage for shaping those impacts. So we don’t have to fret as much about the speed of capability development; our efforts should focus more on the deployment stage both from the perspective of realizing AI’s benefits and responding to risks. All this is not just true of today’s AI, but even in the face of hypothetical developments such as self-improvement in AI capabilities. Many of the limits to the power of AI systems are (and should be) external to those systems, so that they cannot be overcome simply by having AI go off and improve its own technical design.

  The idea of focusing more on the deployment stage seems pretty consistent with Will MacAskill’s latest forum post about making the transition to a post-AGI society go well. There are other aspects of the “AI as normal technology” worldview that I expect will conflict more with Forethought’s, but I’m not sure that conflict would necessarily be frustrating and unproductive—as you say, it might depend on the person’s characteristics like openness and willingness to update, etc.

• Tax Geek 29 Sep 2025 19:54 UTC

  13 points

  4 ∶ 0

  on: What posts are you think­ing about writ­ing?

  I’m considering writing a post on how I think governments are likely to respond to the tax, spending, and inequality pressures that transformative AI will bring.

  Others have already pointed out that if TAI displaces a lot of workers, this will reduce tax revenue (as most countries’ tax bases rely heavily on labour income) while increasing government spending (to pay for benefits to support people out of work). I’ve also read some articles suggesting we’ll need a high degree of global coordination in order to make sure AI’s benefits are widely distributed.

  I agree global coordination on tax would be the first best solution, but I also think it is highly unlikely to happen. However:

  • I think there are things individual countries can (and hopefully will) do to mitigate national inequality;

  • I’m not sure TAI will worsen global inequality (I think it probably will, but not by as much as I initially thought); and

  • I don’t think governments are going to go broke everywhere (I don’t this is actually possible). We will likely see significant economic disruptions and maybe a few defaults, but the fiscal situation may not be as bad as some people seem to think.

  I’m not sure exactly where I’ll end up with it, but my hope is to outline a few realistic pathways that will help people (including myself) decide where best to focus their efforts.

  Please let me know if you’d be willing to read drafts or act as a sounding board — I would very much appreciate the help.

• Tax Geek 17 Sep 2025 8:32 UTC

  2 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Pri­vacy as a Blind Spot: Are There Long Term Harms in Us­ing Face­book, Google, Slack etc.?

  Thank you very much for this post. I agree that privacy seems to be a massive blindspot for EA. I think it is a common blindspot for well-meaning people/​groups, because they find it hard to imagine how adversarial actors might actually act.

  As a counterbalance to the “convenience” benefits offered by tech cloud platforms, I want to point out that there are also people who are concerned about data privacy who may hesitate to participate in EA activities/​workshops/​bootcamps or apply to EA grants/​orgs if it would require handing over copious amounts of personal information or even having a LinkedIn profile (given LinkedIn’s terrible reputation with privacy). I am one such person.

  I know there are always trade-offs between convenience and security, and that LinkedIn is widely used in recruitment spaces. But I would like to see more considered discussion of these trade-offs within EA. Currently the default just seems to rely on a high degree of trust, but even well-meaning people might can inadvertently leak other people’s information (e.g. feeding example profiles into an AI to help them write their own profile). My initial impression is that there is much more that could be done to protect privacy without significant convenience cost.

  For example, I attended EAGx Virtual conferences in 2023 and 2024. The Google sheets with over 1000 attendees’ personal data (which is maintained by CEA) was shared with all attendees, and I still have access to these in 2025. I don’t see much benefit for these documents to exist at all, let alone remain publicly accessible years after the conference has ended. This likely also breaches data privacy laws in many jurisdictions, including the GDPR, which has a principle of data minimisation and requiring data to be kept no longer than is necessary.

  At the very least, the retention policies for widely shared documents should be seriously considered.

• Tax Geek 24 Jun 2025 20:45 UTC

  4 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Hugh P’s comment on: In Defense of “Sweat­shops”

  Good point. The study undermines the traditional economic narrative that sweatshop jobs are clearly better than workers’ alternatives—e.g. it would challenge this statement in the original post:

  Economists across the political spectrum have pointed out that for many sweatshop workers the alternatives are much, much worse.

  But it doesn’t go so far as to show that sweatshops are clearly worse than workers’ alternatives, either, which is what sweatshop opponents often claim. So it seems to be a middle-of-the-road finding that supports your idea that the Ethiopian labour market was actually more efficient than people had previously assumed. It’s still notable because it challenges conventional wisdom on both sides of the debate.

  The study had a third “entrepreneurship” condition that involved giving people $300 plus some business training. Unsurprisingly (imo), participants under that condition did better than both the sweatshop and control conditions. So while I don’t think boycotting companies that use sweatshops is likely to be a very effective way of doing good, I don’t think going out of your way to support sweatshops is likely to be worthwhile, either—there are likely to be better ways to promote economic development.

• Tax Geek 22 Jun 2025 12:56 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: In Defense of “Sweat­shops”

  Thanks for the nitpick, I’ve fixed it in my post. Agree that the randomisation element is very useful.

• Tax Geek 21 Jun 2025 17:02 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: In Defense of “Sweat­shops”

  The 2nd edition of Benjamin’s book may have been published in 2025, but I’m not sure how much it updated from the 1st edition, which was published in 2014 - i.e. before the results of Blattman’s 2016 paper that I mentioned in my other comment.

  I have not read Benjamin’s book but based on the Amazon description, it sounds like the 2025 edition contains fairly minimal updates.

• Tax Geek 21 Jun 2025 16:56 UTC

  54 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: In Defense of “Sweat­shops”

  Chris Blattman actually carried out some randomised controlled experiments with sweatshops in Ethiopia and published a paper in 2016 on the results. (The paper refers to these as “industrial jobs” but Blattman elsewhere has described them as “sweatshops”.) They found that, contrary to traditional economic thinking, workers who got jobs in sweatshops were not necessarily better off than those who did not.

  Most who got sweatshop jobs quit within just a few months, leaving the sector entirely. Those who stayed experience higher rates of serious health problems and disability compared to the control group. Income effects after a year did seem to be slightly higher for those in sweatshops compared to the control group, but not statistically significant.

  The paper concludes:

  Overall, the results suggest that that industrial firms in Ethiopia paid no better than worker’s informal alternatives, so that most workers were at best indifferent between these forms of work. This suggests a formal and informal labor market that was more fluid and competitive than expected, at least for the young, unskilled, and capital-poor.

  Usual caveats apply about this being a limited study in Ethiopia, and more studies would be needed to see if the results generalise. But it is nevertheless an important study that challenges the traditional economic narrative of “sweatshop jobs are better than no jobs”.