Abstract:
The rapid development of AI threatens to erode government revenues, resulting in stark inequality, and an extreme concentration of economic and geopolitical power. To prevent this, governments require effective mechanisms for capturing the economic value of AI by shifting taxation away from labour and towards capital. Token taxes – surcharges on model inference applied at the point of sale – are a promising contender for such a mechanism as they are more likely to be enforceable via compute governance infrastructure. While token taxes have been proposed, many technical, economic, and legal questions associated with implementation remain unanswered. This project seeks to answer whether we can model the impact of a token tax and alternative fiscal mechanisms on the UK economy using LLM-powered agent-based modelling.
About the speaker:
Lucas Irwin is currently a DPhil student at the University of Oxford and the Oxford Martin School AI Governance Initiative (AIGI). He holds a bachelors in Computer Science from Princeton University, was a summer fellow at the Centre for AI Governance, and has had his research featured in Bloomberg, ICML, ICLR and Just Security.
Registration:
Registration will open shortly. Please contact complexity@inet.ox.ac.uk if you have any questions in the meantime.