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Karl Marx in the Age of AI: A New Way for Bringing Equity, Rewards, and Personalization to Taxpayers and Welfare Beneficiaries

Being Human for a Better Tomorrow in the Age of AI

  • October 25, 2024
  • 20th edition
  • 9th in Vol 2
Karl Marx in the Age of AI

But AI agency is not only about work and companies. There are societal benefits to be gained in finance, healthcare, education, and environment, and in the next set of editions we will explore new ideas and programs in these areas.

Let’s start with societal finance and explore the impact of AI for stakeholders on both funding and spending sides of the equation — Tax Payers and Welfare Beneficiaries.

“From each according to their means and to each according to their need.”
– Karl Marx

Karl Marx, philosopher, author, social theorist, and economist, made this fundamental principled postulation on taxes and benefit.

AI offers a real opportunity to implement this vision in a new way that can simultaneously recognize individual contributions of taxpayers while ensuring precise delivery of benefits tailored to individual welfare beneficiary needs.

This can be the guiding principle to assess how we are doing today and how AI can improve impact on taxpayers and welfare beneficiaries.

Where Are We Today?

Historically, paying tax has been seen as an essential part of a social contract — an obligation for gaining the benefit of living in a civilized society, infrastructure, security, and rule of law. But times are changing.

As per UNCTAD, global public debt has increased by 50% to $92 trillion in the last 10 years and the number of countries with high debt has nearly tripled from 22 to 59.

OECD countries and developing nations spend 20%+ and 15%+ of GDP respectively on welfare.

Hence, governments globally are increasing taxes to reduce debt/control deficit and support increasing welfare spending. Finance and revenue departments in government across all major economies are taking initiatives (including using AI) for reducing cost of collection, tax evasion, and avoidance.

In many countries, the tax collections are ahead of real growth and inflation. This, along with increased welfare spending, has caused many taxpayers to feel marginalized and seek spending attention in other areas such as infrastructure and security for the taxes paid.

On the welfare side, benefits such as education, healthcare, and subsidies are given based on prefixed criteria. They are not personalized to the needs of individual households and do not reflect dynamic changes in beneficiary status over time or life events to increase, decrease, or off-board from benefits whenever exit criteria is met.

There Is a New Way

AI for Tax Payers – Equity, Rewards, and Incentives

Here are five ways where AI can help in increasing equity and reward for taxpayers to bring some cheer and sense of social engagement and future building.

The first three increase rewards and incentives, and the last two increase equity by providing tax credits to taxpayers:

  1. Personalized services – AI enhanced or AI driven personalized service for queries on citizen services such as certificates, approvals, enrollments, documentation besides answering queries and explaining assessments relating to filings.

  2. Reward – Create a reward criteria such as filings, consistency, growth in tax paid for tiered reward program for priority services. Use a chain of thought reasoning to assess interests, capabilities and design a recognition program with tiered benefits ranging from badges, host/invite for special events and even cultural ambassadorship for citizen to citizen ties to supplement governmental ties.

  3. Feedback – Seek feedback on policies and policy making and governance – AI platform to share policies, proposals and review for feedback.

  4. Surplus value – Create a mechanism to model to track changes and capture surplus value (for simplicity sake we can detail this difference between revenue/employee and cost/employee) across industries and assign surplus as tax credits in calculations for eligible tax payers.

  5. Data Taxation: The development and deployment of AI systems often involve complex global value chains, with different stages of the process, such as research and development, data collection, and algorithm training, processing taking place in different jurisdictions. Use AI to develop a personal data value calculator for platforms. Levy and credit data tax to platforms for distribution between governments and users.

AI for Welfare Beneficiaries – Personalized, Integrated, and Dynamic

Here are two ways AI-driven or enhanced programs can make a difference for transforming beneficiary experience and program impact:

  1. Personalized, integrated and dynamic welfare program: AI can assess the needs of individuals or families with far greater detail than current systems, taking into account health, education, living conditions, life events and future potential needs. This could lead to a smart integrated common benefit welfare system where benefits are not siloed and distributed not according to fixed categories but based on a personalized, continuous and dynamic need analysis to maximize benefits to the most needy (maximin principle) and when they need it most.

  2. Welfare Beneficiary Feedback: AI could implement continuous multimodal, multilingual, multichannel feedback mechanisms from direct beneficiaries where the effectiveness of welfare programs is constantly evaluated and adjusted. This would ensure that the welfare system evolves and remains aligned with the actual needs of the population, potentially reducing waste and increasing satisfaction with government programs.

We took one aspect of societal welfare — namely taxation and welfare benefits — used Marxian wisdom as a guiding principle, and it gives seven new citizen-facing ideas for strengthening equity, personalization, trust, and transparency in taxation and welfare spending.

This is not to say it will be easy. Challenges in using AI for social protection and as reward mechanisms abound. There are few precedents, some accountability and explainability problems, poor data quality, and misuse of integrated data.

However, exploration of difficult terrain, uncharted waters, or space even has not deterred humans in the past and should not do so now. The quantum of impact, citizen connect, and a better future is a worthy prize!

Social impact of AI directly concerns officials in government, administration, experts, or civil society. It also matters if you are none of them as it impacts the future for ourselves, children, family, friends and appeals to a desire that we leave the world in a better place than the world we came into.

Call to Stakeholders

This is a call to stakeholders to consider these ideas and a request to all of us as citizens to:

  1. Stay curious and aware of how AI could reshape societal finance and our role within it.

  2. Reflect on how AI-driven systems might impact you personally—whether as a taxpayer or a beneficiary.

  3. Make and join the conversation: how can we ensure AI creates a fairer, more equitable future for all

  4. Share your thoughts, feedback and the article to your stakeholders connects
As Karl Marx would have said — “Futurists of the world unite!”

I hope these insights help. Please subscribe, follow, and share.

Comments and questions are welcome.

Best wishes

II. Questioning / Asking

Good conversations flow from well‑sequenced questions—topical, simple, coherent, cohesive.
LLM Conversation Example 1
Q: What are empirical judgments?

A: Empirical judgments are based on observation, experience, or experimentation.
Q: What are moral judgments?

A: Moral judgments are based on ethical principles and values.
“AI is a language. Treat it like one: practice, iterate, and mind your grammar prompts, assumptions, and verification.”

Select Quotes

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
— Karl Marx
"A society is just when it maximizes the minimum level of well-being for its members."
— John Rawls
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
— Margaret Mead
"Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come."
— Victor Hugo
"I can behave humanely with the thing, only if the thing behaves humanely with me."
— Karl Marx
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