AI, Mental Health, and Taxes
Someone on here earlier was talking about how AI could be used to help people with their mental health. Quoting a study saying about how 60% of people in a survey asked a chatbot for help with their mental health. The conclusion drawn was that, while admitting we need to remove barriers, we should figure out how to make AI safe for this task.
And I mean, sure. Look at the success of the "Let's Make Crack Safe" campaigns of the 80s and 90s.
Did you see the story recently about people using Meta's AI chatbot to hack into accounts? They did it by the super tricky method of asking the bot to pretty please change the email associated with the account, and then reset the password.[1]
So when a person is thinking really dark thoughts at 2 a.m., maybe we should invest in mental health experts?
From a quick internet search, let's put the cost of a psychiatry degree at $250,000. If Meta paid for 500 new psychiatrists, that would be $125 million dollars. Then let's say they then paid each of those knew psychiatriests $250,000 per year, for the next 20 years. That would cost $2.5 billion dollars over 20 years.
Meta plans to spend, on the low side, $135 billion dollars for AI just this year.[2] It could take 2.1% of that and pay for for the education and salaries of 500 new psychiatrists.
According to the same article, the expected expenditures by Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft is expected to be in the $700 billion range. Take a 2.1% cut of that, and that's 2,800 new psychiatrists out in the world.
That would be much more useful than chat bots that can be "hacked" by saying "pretty please."
Look at it another way: In 2025, Meta paid an effective tax rate of 3.6% for $79 billion income.[3] Raise their tax rate by 2%, you pay for 300 psychiatrists. Raise it to the regular 21% federal tax rate and we the people have $13.7 billion for social services.
There's $220,000,000,000 in medical debt in the US[4]. It gets sold for 1-3 cents on the dollar [5]. You could buy it all, at 3 cents per dollar, and pay it off with $6.6 billion. Less than half the taxes Meta did not pay last year would wipe out medical debt.
That's just one company, funding billionaires and doing so on the backs of the working people.
"But you'll eat into their profits!" Yeah, so? I pay my taxes and no one feels bad for me. Nor should you. It benefits me, and my community, and I'm fine with it.
But more than that: If Zuck has $135 BILLION to pay for AI he has the money to pay his taxes. And if he does not, well, then he should cut out the lattes and data centers like the rest of us are always told.