A New Tax for the AI Era

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[00:00:33] Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, May 8th. I'm Imani 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, a chorus of voices is calling for policy to adapt.

[00:01:00] 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.

[00:01:28] 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? WSJ contributor Ken Wells joins us to explain why some anglers feared stripping the skill from a beloved pastime. So, for our listeners who haven't been competitive fishing before,

[00:01:54] 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 or grandfather or grandmother fishing skills. And, for example, if you're fishing freshwater 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 had no idea, unless the water was crystal clear, whether there was a fish there or not.

[00:02:20] Now, with forward-facing sonar, you know not only where the fish are, but how many there are, how deep they are, and based 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?

[00:02:50] You have professional fishermen like Randy Blaucat, who's in the story, who thinks this is an abomination, that it is taking all the mystery and the expertise out of this sport. It's also an economic issue because these things are expensive. You know, the cheapest of these systems are about $3,000. And with all the analogs, there 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 putt-putt boat and fishing,

[00:03:18] you are at an incredible disadvantage. 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.

[00:03:48] In a lot of fields right now, technology is replacing human intuition or craft. Do 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. Like with forward-facing sonar, you still have to know how to fish. So it's not like a slam dunk that you're going to catch every fish that you throw to.

[00:04:14] 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 is the fishing fanatic of the family. And he is a longtime live scope. This is one of the brand's fishermen. And as he says, the scope don't lie. He loves it. He thinks that it has changed his fishing life.

[00:04:39] 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 Pontchartrain in New Orleans. It's a saltwater lake. And his live scope picked up all these giant blobs 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.

[00:05:06] And we caught 59 of them in about an hour. We caught and released most of them. These have been eating. So we kept maybe a couple for the pan. But, you know, that's an example of where had we not had four tracings sooner, I doubt we weren't even spending time looking for catfish under that bridge. Sounds delicious. Yeah, it is. Fry them up. That was WSJ contributor Ken Wells. How is new technology changing your hobbies?

[00:05:34] 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 for and against. That's after the break. Nearly home. Isn't home where we all want to be? Reba here for Realtor.com, the Pro's number one most trusted app.

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[00:06:31] 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. WSJ reporter Katie Binley joins us now to explain who's behind the push and how a tax might work.

[00:07:00] 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

[00:07:25] you'd be taxing, you know, 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 going to be that 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.

[00:07:55] 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?

[00:08:24] 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.

[00:08:50] 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.

[00:09:19] 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 an 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.

[00:09:48] And then when it comes to labor, for example, one economist I spoke with is 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

[00:10:17] or angst about AI. Can you talk about how a tax 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, you know, 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

[00:10:46] and soaking up. So he's a fan of the idea of spreading the proceeds around, if you will. That was WSJ 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 LaValle wrote our theme music.

[00:11:14] Our supervising producer is Katie Ferguson. Our development producer is Aisha Al-Muslim. And Chris Zinsley is the deputy editor of audio for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back later this morning with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening. All passengers, the Uber ride for Mark and Jamal's romantic weekend will depart in four minutes from Platform 6.

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