A New Tax for the AI Era

♪ Nearly home ♪ Isn't home where we all want to be? Reba here for Realtor.com, the Pro's number one most trusted app. A dream home, and a dream home, if it comes with a nightmare commute, that's why Realtor.com has Realtor Commute, so you can search by drive time. Download the Realtor.com app today, 'cause you're nearly home. ♪ Make it real with Realtor.com ♪ Pro's number one most trusted app, based on August 20, 25, proprietary survey. (upbeat music) Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, May 8th. I'm Ymani Moise for the Wall Street Journal. High-tech gadgets have made catching prize bass almost as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, and are creating a sea change in the sport of competitive fishing. We're diving into what happens when new tech rocks the boat. And as AI starts to reshape the economy, the course of voices is calling for policy to adapt. We'll break down an old idea that's resurfacing with support from unlikely allies, like billionaire John Arnold and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang. But first, a popular technology called Forward Facing Sonar is shaking up fishing. Forward Facing Sonar equipment is mounted below the waterline of a boat, and uses sound waves to give anglers an underwater view of fish movements in real time. That's helping even inexperienced fishermen reel in trophy bass with startling precision. It's had an impact on competitive fishing as well, with tournament winning weights climbing since the technology took off. But is it changing the sport altogether? W. H. J. contributor Ken Wells joins us to explain why some anglers fear stripping the skill from a beloved pastime. So far listeners who haven't been competitive fishing before, can you just paint a clearer picture of what fishing was like with and without Forward Facing Sonar? - Well, in the old days, you learn from your father, grandfather, or grandmother, fishing skills. And for example, if you're fishing fresh water and you see stumps coming out of the water, you would cast those spots, what they call blind casting basically, and hope that there was a fish there. But you got no idea unless the water was crystal clear of whether there was a fish there or not. Now, with form of facing sonar, you know, not only where the fish are, but how many there are, how deep they are, and best upon the blobs of the screen, where the big ones are. It also tells you, by the way, where the fish aren't. So in the old days, you might waste an entire day fishing in a spot where there are no fish. So I mean, it's just a sea change. - And we're seeing a lot of competitive organizations moving to restrict or ban this technology. What's their core argument? What do they feel like is being lost? - You have professional fishermen like Randy Balecathus and Stuart, who thinks this is an abomination that is taking all the mystery and the expertise out of this sport. It's also an economic issue because these things are expensive. You have the cheapest of these systems are about $3,000 and with all the ad laws that can be people who can have $50,000 worth of electronics on their boat. And if you're just an ordinary person, who is used to just going out there with your little butt-pluck boat and fishing, and you are at incredible disadvantages. - And what do supporters of the technology say? - The argument is that young people particularly love technology. And so this is bringing a lot of younger anglers into the sport. In terms of hunting, the argument is that it's really not unfair. You still have to have skill. You still have to be able to be a marksman. You're really not taking unfair advantage. - This feels like a much bigger story than just fishing or hunting. And a lot of feels right now, technology is replacing human intuition or craft. Did the people you spoke to see this as inevitable progress or something that we should be pushing back on? - Just like in AI, there are people who say it's the end of the world, and then there are people who are saying, get with the program. With Ford facing sonar, you still know how to have to know how to fish. So it's not like a slam dunk that you catch every fish that you throw to. So it's not really endangering fish populations in the way that people think it might. - And you're a fisherman yourself. Have you tried out these technologies? - Oh yeah, I have a brother, my baby brother, Bob, who's the fishing fanatic of the family. And he is a long time live scope. This is one of the brands, fishermen. And as he says, the scope don't lie. - He loves it. - He thinks that it has changed his fishing life. And it's not so much the fish that he finds, but it's the places where he discovers there's nothing to be had there. So he doesn't waste his time anymore. - But it is really peculiar. I went out with him on a place called Lake Ponsetraida, New Orleans, it's a saltwater lake. And his life's go picked up all these giant bobs along the bottom and we started casting to them. And they were catfish. They actually shouldn't have been there. They're a freshwater species. But they're there in the saltwater. And we caught 59 of them in about an hour. We caught release most of them. These have been eating. So we kept maybe a couple for the pan. But that's an example of where had we not had for tracing solar, I doubt we were even spending time looking for catfish under that bridge. - Sounds delicious. - Yeah, it does. Fry 'em up. - That was W.A.J. contributor Ken Wells. How is new technology changing your hobbies? If you're a listener on Spotify, leave us a comment with your thoughts. Coming up, as AI begins to disrupt the economy, some are proposing attacks on AI processing. We'll explain the case four and against. That's after the break. (dramatic music) How are the US businesses of Philip Morris International invested in America? We're invested in advancing science, giving adults who smoke better options. We're invested in American manufacturing, helping local economies thrive. We're invested in community, supporting military veterans and their families, disaster relief and economic empowerment. Because we're proud to be invested in America. See how at uspmie.com. (upbeat music) - Nearly a decade ago, Bill Gates floated the idea of a robot tax, arguing that if automation replaces human workers, companies should help offset the economic fallout. Now, as AI's rapid growth fuels anxiety about the labor market, an idea once mostly confined to policy circles is entering the mainstream. Some political officials and tech leaders are now promoting a compute tax, which would place a levy on the computing power behind artificial intelligence. W. H.J. reporter, Katie Binley, joins us now to explain who's behind the push and how a tax might work. So, Katie, what would a compute tax look like? - There's a couple of different ways in which people envision this working. One of them would be to tax data centers. Some people also refer to what they think would be like a token tax, tokens or units of AI measurement. So, you would be taxing that instead. And there's also different views on whether you would tax like at the front end say, maybe you'd be taxing the companies that are operating the data centers or you could tax the consumer or the companies that are actually using it. But either way, the end product is gonna be that AI would get a bit more expensive. And why is the idea of a compute tax getting traction right now? - There's been discussion about it recently, I think, in part because there's been so much attention and debate about what AI is ultimately going to do to the economy, to jobs. There are so many unknowns right now, but we have had just this wave of conversation about what to expect and a lot of gloom and doom predictions out there. So, it's, I think, a reasonable time for people to be talking about, you know, what if any policy measures might make sense to mitigate some of the negative consequences. And I mean, there's certainly a lot of debate about whether or not a tax is the way to do that. - So, who are some of the supporters of a potential tax? - Andrew Yang, who ran for president in 2020 and is co-chair of the Forward Party, has been a pretty vocal proponent of the idea of a compute tax for some time now. He's also a fan of taking the proceeds of that tax and putting them toward a universal basic income. And then there's been more chatter about it online, certainly back in 2021. Sam Altman actually said he was a fan of a version of a compute tax, but more recently, he said that he has changed his thinking on that. - What's the anti-tax argument? - People worry that it could stifle innovation, that it could push the industry abroad more, someone I spoke with, a researcher also mentioned that there are tons of people using AI for things that you know, you maybe wouldn't want to slow down or make more expensive things like discovering new drugs or weather forecasting or fraud detection, things like that. - Are there alternative policy proposals floating around to address AI's impact on the economy without a tax? - Yeah, some people just believe that the tax itself is too blunt and object and that instead, you should tackle each issue with its own policy, or own adjustment or regulation or whatnot. So for example, if one of the concerns is AI safety or any sort of existential risks that AI might pose, some people believe that then you should put regulations in place as opposed to a tax. And then when it comes to labor, for example, one economist I spoke with as a fan of the idea of making the labor market more dynamic. So maybe you'd have portable benefits, job retraining. equipping people with skills that they're going to need for this new era. So there's various other ways that people think that you can mitigate some of the negatives of AI. Some of the sources in your story talked about a potential compute tax as a way to manage backlash or angst about AI. Can you talk about how attacks would fix those broader concerns? There's sort of a theory that with the enormous amount of wealth generated by AI that if you kind of spread it around more, that people would be maybe more accepting of it. So Andrew Yang, for example, his take is that the volume of taxes being paid by the biggest AI companies are not commensurate with the value that AI is going to end up generating and soaking up. So he's a fan of the idea of spreading the proceeds around, if you will. That was W.A. reporter Katie Binley. Do you think there should be a compute tax? Why or why not? If you're a listener on Spotify, drop us a comment with your take. And that's it for tech news briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang. I'm your host, Imani Moise. Additional support this week from Danny Lewis. Jessica Fenton and Michael Laval wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Katie Ferguson. Our development producer is Aisha Al-Muzlim. And Chris Sinsley is a deputy editor of audio for the Wall Shoot Journal. We'll be back later this morning with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.