One approach to dealing with the AI labor crisis is a universal basic income combined with high corporate taxes and high taxes on high income brackets to fund the UBI. If the economy is fully automated, most of America's productive capacity will have consolidated under the control of a few enormous corporations that do not need human labor. As a result, the only people with jobs will be those who control these corporations, their sycophants and a few people who do what cannot be automated. All three groups will be paid extremely well while the rest of America's population will be jobless.
Without interference, America's 99% will get sucked dry and run out of money. The automated corporations will trade among themselves, allowing for economic growth even as the majority of the population becomes destitute.
The function of high, progressive taxes on corporations is to pump wealth out of the automated corporations to be used on a UBI. Similarly high taxes on extremely wealthy individuals would be one of the many measures necessary to prevent the automated corporations from finding a tax shelter they can use to give their highest ranking members more wealth and power. In theory, money would flow from the people to the corporations to the government, which then redistributes the wealth via a UBI back to the people. The new taxes are necessary because a UBI that can fully replace lost jobs would be exceptionally expensive. If America's government implemented a $50,000 basic income available to all adults, it would cost 13 trillion per year.
In practice, it will be very difficult to get corporations and their shareholders to give up their wealth even if the government was controlled by the people. This breaks the loop because the government will not be able to recoup all the money spent on the UBI via taxes, making either inflation via money printing or a debit crisis inevitable.
The society that results from a successful implementation of the UBI I describe has several flaws that I disapprove of. Chief among them is that the average American becomes fully dependent on a government which has drifted away from its founding ideals. Nevertheless, I suspect that the society I describe would be metastable, stagnant and prosperous, serving as a baseline other outcomes can be compared to.
Notably, this is not my preferred solution. My preferred solution revolves around the development of spinal implants that can reroute neural signals to and from external machines on command. Among other benefits, this technology would allow people to directly control machines as if they were their own limbs, reducing the need for AI labor. I would need to make another comment to elaborate and explain further since adding more paragraphs to this comment would make it too unwieldy.
One approach to dealing with the AI labor crisis is a universal basic income combined with high corporate taxes and high taxes on high income brackets to fund the UBI. If the economy is fully automated, most of America's productive capacity will have consolidated under the control of a few enormous corporations that do not need human labor. As a result, the only people with jobs will be those who control these corporations, their sycophants and a few people who do what cannot be automated. All three groups will be paid extremely well while the rest of America's population will be jobless.
Without interference, America's 99% will get sucked dry and run out of money. The automated corporations will trade among themselves, allowing for economic growth even as the majority of the population becomes destitute.
The function of high, progressive taxes on corporations is to pump wealth out of the automated corporations to be used on a UBI. Similarly high taxes on extremely wealthy individuals would be one of the many measures necessary to prevent the automated corporations from finding a tax shelter they can use to give their highest ranking members more wealth and power. In theory, money would flow from the people to the corporations to the government, which then redistributes the wealth via a UBI back to the people. The new taxes are necessary because a UBI that can fully replace lost jobs would be exceptionally expensive. If America's government implemented a $50,000 basic income available to all adults, it would cost 13 trillion per year.
In practice, it will be very difficult to get corporations and their shareholders to give up their wealth even if the government was controlled by the people. This breaks the loop because the government will not be able to recoup all the money spent on the UBI via taxes, making either inflation via money printing or a debit crisis inevitable.
The society that results from a successful implementation of the UBI I describe has several flaws that I disapprove of. Chief among them is that the average American becomes fully dependent on a government which has drifted away from its founding ideals. Nevertheless, I suspect that the society I describe would be metastable, stagnant and prosperous, serving as a baseline other outcomes can be compared to.
Notably, this is not my preferred solution. My preferred solution revolves around the development of spinal implants that can reroute neural signals to and from external machines on command. Among other benefits, this technology would allow people to directly control machines as if they were their own limbs, reducing the need for AI labor. I would need to make another comment to elaborate and explain further since adding more paragraphs to this comment would make it too unwieldy.