- filing taxes for each machine (companies may have millions of machines)
- determining how much income all machines make (for machines used by humans, e.g. sewing machines, how do you determine what percentage of the income is made by the human vs the machine)
- taxing cloud usage (How to determine netflix's % income made by cloud vs by advertising, by original content, etc)
Yes. It may be harder to figure out the definition of a machine - e.g. a computer can have multiple programs running, is it one machine? - but this is one direction.
> - determining how much income all machines make
Yes, it's tricky, but we can try. For example, some temporary measurements which can be updated every few years?
> - taxing cloud usage
Yes, we can measure power, bandwidth, network sessions for that.
Profit equals revenue minus costs. It is financially relatively interesting today to have a high cost (typically going to machines, buildings, energy, advertising, financial services and business trips), because it makes the (tax on) profits lower.