Comment by Greg Jensen

I would just separate the two things. I think higher taxes on capital, given the concentration of wealth in the US, has a lot of merit to it. But I would separate that point from the point I just made on both the externalities of potentially replacement technologies versus complementary technologies and say that you may well need both: higher taxes on capital and token taxes. But there’s a purpose to the machine taxes that, if you just tax capital, you miss—which is, to say, there are a) externalities to having machine labor doing work instead of humans and b) why would you want to punish human labor? No matter what the capital gains tax rate is, why would you want to punish human labor versus machine intelligence labor? So, those are the reasons that I’m focused on the token tax, and it’s a separate issue of whether you want to raise capital gains taxes, which I also think given everything that’s going on, putting capital gains taxes aligned to income taxes is totally reasonable policy. I’d be in favor of that as well, but it’s not the focus of this piece because it doesn’t deal directly with the issues raised by artificial intelligence.