Let’s take this to its logical limit: imagine that AI gets so good that it can replace a lot of jobs en masse. The most popular job in about half of the US is truck drivers, and in the states where it is teachers, truck drivers are number 2. Let’s say we do get to not only self-driving trucks but self-driving trucks loaded by robotic warehouse workers. Let’s postulate that this becomes the norm and let’s say that along with robotic truck drivers and warehouse workers, we also get robotic cashier, road work crews, and so on. I am not giving a timeline here, but let’s explore what happens when we get to 30% unemployment. Then 40%, 50%, 80%.

Sure we will have the robot wrangler engineers, scientists, teachers, nurses, etc. But typically we have social unrest past like 8% unemployment. What happens when double digits of people have no jobs and all the time on their hands? Well “eat the rich” might become very literal and no amount of protection against that can really be bought. Ultimately, the only option is either a Dune-style elimination of all AI (very unlikely) or we will have to decouple “living wage income” from “job”. If you think about it, the idea that you must have a job in order to make money is more of an implementation detail. If robots produce so much value that it is actively not even viable for humans to work, the only real logical solution is to distribute the profits from the labor of the robots in a way that isn’t by hourly rate times hours worked. In fact one possible way to do this is to tax the value produced by AI and then funnel that to a universal basic income program. Everyone by default is an artist. If you want to be a nurse or teacher or scientist or engineer you can. Otherwise just produce art at your leisure while the robots work the fields and cook your meals.