Comment by Greg Jensen

Tax policy must stop disincentivizing human labor versus machine labor. Right now, human labor is taxed and regulated in ways that put it at an unnecessary disadvantage versus AI. Similar to globalization in the early 2000s, an entirely new pool of “labor” is coming online via AI, which will be competitive with human workers. This new source of labor is tax-advantaged because machine work is not taxed at all, while employers pay wage taxes for human labor—meaning that pursuant to the tax code as it exists today, government is tipping the scale to benefit AI work relative to human work. This tax asymmetry unintentionally incentivizes more substitution of AI labor for human labor than may be optimal under equal tax treatment. A token tax can help put human and machine labor on the same footing. Tokens are the output of AI thinking and the prices paid for that output can be analogized to wages paid for AI labor, so levying a consumption tax on tokens is a good starting proxy for the income tax currently levied on human labor.