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Comment by denhaus | Hacker News Reader

legitimately the shittiest, most boring, and most unimaginatively dystopian use for AI I have ever seen.

Why? Taxes is what sends children to school, pays for hospitals and funds the infrastructure everyone uses. People love to hear about AI breakthroughs that could transform education or health, why should they not be happy about this?

I have many doubts about the actual technical solution, but I wouldn't discard the work because it's for taxation purpose.

The power balance between state and individual is quite delicate and everything that changes it makes people uneasy. Most people want a situation where law and order is more or less upheld, but the state is otherwise unable to precisely know or control how people live.

Enforcing property taxes is hardly a substantial change to that balance though, realistically.

From my understanding they paid CapGemini €24M for this project in order to net €10M in taxes.

Most of that will be fixed costs. It won't cost nearly so much the next time.

...when will the next 20.000 swimming pools be done?

Another commenter pointed out that having a pool influences the property value and thereby tax, so they should be able to collect the tax yearly, not just once.

That's 10M extra per year. You pay property taxes each year.

If it's anything like the big consulting firms' rip-offs in the USA, it might well be every year.

Look at the disgraceful fleecing of our national parks by Booz Allen: https://www.wsj.com/articles/national-park-fees-booz-allen-6...

The $10m comes from about 10% of France's territory that was used as an experiment.

So it will likely need $300M in fees to CapGemini to expand to the other 90%.

And the model will need to be rebuilt in 2 years.

The article says "The public finance authority DGFiP said the AI programme would now be rolled out nationwide, potentially leading to €40m in new taxes on private pools in 2023".

So total revenue is not that significantly higher than €10m.

Taxes are pissed away in France in gigantic useless bureaucracies, useless projects and vote-buying redistribution, to the point that core state functions (police/justice, army, education or healthcare system) are paradoxically starved of funds and dysfunctional. Sadly the only way to curb this spending incontinence seems to starve the state of revenues.

Why "sadly"? Starving it also gives it less power, and more power and freedom to the individuals. This is even truer in France.

The state only has as much power as it can wield and as what the people will take. Individuality the way you’re implying does not exist in societies where not even food, shelter, and basic dignity is guaranteed and provided to all.

> Sadly the only way to curb this spending incontinence seems to starve the state of revenues.

Or reform the broken democracy at the crux of it all.

When has reforming worked? No less with democracies (which are all broken anyway)

Some countries manage. Finland and Switzerland are personal favourite examples of successful reform. There are others, too.

Plus it is impolite to call for a revolution, even if we're talking about France

You forgot jet flights because, you understand, there were no business class seat available on commercial flights at the right time. I thought it was an isolated incident (the random undersecretary who otherwise couldn’t have made it on time for the government’s school book picture), but it appears to not be so isolated [1] [2].

On some random weird "missions" [3] paid €9.000 a month, or life-long supposed "postings", granted at the discretion of the government, such as our dear ambassador to the penguins [4] [5] (lovingly called "ambassador to the poles", although the previous one, "Michel Rocard", a life-long politician, was apparently also known as "Rocky the Penguin").

And that’s just off the top of my head.

If we were to focus less on the rather questionable spending, and more on the doubtfully useful, we could cite the public health system, where it seems that more than a third of the money goes to the administrative side, and not actual healthcare workers [6], with a significantly bigger share of bureaucratic employees than most European countries.

And I’m pretty sure starving the state of revenue will not curb any of this. It’s not like they’ve shown they were sensible, or acting in good faith.

[1] https://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2010/03/29/806733-ministre-...

[2]: https://la1ere.francetvinfo.fr/vol-350000-euros-autres-gouve...

[3]: https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2010/06/09/boutin-c...

[4]: https://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/frais-d-ambassadrice-des-p...

[5]: https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/2019/09/18/est-il-vrai-q...

[6]: https://www.challenges.fr/entreprise/sante-et-pharmacie/a-l-...

It's people that can afford pools on their property. They can afford to own property. I'm not shedding many tears here.

If even a tiny amount of the money recovered improves the lot of the vulnerable then I find it hard to put this at the top of my "this year's dystopian" list.

Your comment however might go on my own "most unimaginative definition of dystopian" list.

It costed more to create the AI with capgemini then they recoverd.

One of the reason many of us hate taxes is because they always have a "punishment" mindset.

They rather lose money and punish someone.

Why tax swimming pools anyway?

You misunderstand, this is 10M euro extra tax revenue each year and it was only a pilot project covering a small part of France. The payback time is basically less than a year.

Regardless 25 million of tax money to another consultancy is the problem.

They are of one the biggest benificiaries of the modern western tax system.

It's a complicated problem to solve, but not a 25 million kind of complicated problem.

Also the bill isnt finished yet. 30% error rate, they are working on finetuning solving the issues.

ROI seems fine, I don't see the issue.

The problem with unaffordable housing all over europe should be solved with massive amounts public housing.

Pools should be taxed but that does not solve the problem. Everyone pretends they are not looking at the elephant in the room: draconian environmental regulations and lack of resources make the prices of housing go higher and higher. The governments have the money to solve that, instead of making it worse

AI making normal people lose their jobs, accumulating even more wealth at the top: Good

AI making affluent people pay their share of taxes: Dystopian.

The way I see it, there are some really well off people on this site, so they sympathise with others like them. Off-putting but not unexpected

Why do you think discovering illegal tax evasion is not good?

Because middle-to-lower-class people aren't the ones I want paying more taxes.

How did you arrive at your conclusion that the pools mentioned in the article belong to middle-to-lower class people? Did you do your own analysis and cross-checked it with their income statements? Myself I would expect the pools to disproportionally belong to well-off people.

I don't quite get why you differentiate between classes, everybody has to pay taxes. I would prefer the tax agency to go after (illegally evaded) tax revenue where they get the most bang for their buck, this project paid itself back in less than a year so that seems to fit the bill.

Yes, everybody has to pay taxes. The more money you have/make, the more taxes you need to pay, but the case now is that the more money you have, the more you can avoid taxes.

Sure, the agency can get more of the non-super-rich people who don't have an army of accountants optimizing their tax structure, but I don't think that's the most equitable thing to do.

Monitoring citizens using AI is China-like dystopia.

In America we have a credit score which is quite dystopian. America has the most prisoners and slavery in prisons. The NSA among others monitor citizens.

So?

You made an offhand apolitical comment about China being dystopian in regards where America is arguably worse.

I wake up every day in a right wing dystopia. Even worse, people like you lack the knowledge or solidarity with other workers while having too much nationalism and so on.

I’m going to assume you wouldn’t be able to explain China’s politics nor explain why Taiwan is granted sovereignty but Palestine isn’t. Both places had people before each imperialist group of people conquered land where people already lived. When’s the last time any typical westerner has ever cared about the indigenous people of Taiwan. This doesn’t contradict anything. More of a case where I’m stating the obvious. Even if you happen to actually care about the indigenous people, you’re still going to arrogantly believe Taiwan is a Democratic good guy country. Let’s not even get into Taiwan being fascist for some time…

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