How will we be supported? The biggest question that is not being seriously addressed in this discussion is whether artificial intelligence will eventually take over all our jobs.
Although technology appears formidable, similar fears have arisen repeatedly since the Industrial Revolution, and most working-age adults remain employed. Yet, what is sorely lacking is a serious debate about what to do if this future actually materializes.
For Open AI Sam Altman “The future may be much better than the present” because AI will make us insanely rich. But to almost everyone except Altman and his fellow techno-oligarchs, this seems a risky assumption.
Even if AI creates enormous economic prosperity, its distribution will remain a political challenge. What is needed at this time is a serious, open debate about how the fruits of this prosperity will be distributed among humanity.
There are two parts to addressing the question. The first is about how to design a technologically effective system for redistributing the fruits of the economy as machines take over and labor’s share of income eventually drops to near zero.
However, the more important question is how this economic restructuring will restructure power. Once AI destroys labor income, which provides the main source of government revenue in most advanced countries, who will decide whom to tax? Who decides how much everyday people who don’t have an equity stake in the AI revolution get to consume?
How would society be organized in a world in which machines generate most or all economic output and a few dozen techno-billionaires get to decide how much of the world’s resources – money, energy, minerals – should be allocated to further expanding extraterrestrial intelligence? Who else can say more about directing more resources to health care, or agriculture, or education instead?
“We need guardrails that preserve human agency, human oversight, and human accountability,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi last week. The future of AI “cannot be decided by a handful of countries or left to the will of a few billionaires”.
In AI circles, there is a lively debate about the “alignment” challenge – ensuring that machines work in ways that meet the goals of those running them. The bigger challenge is to align the goals of AI systems and their owners with the broader goals of society. AI will do a lot of consequential work for all of us. Our democratic governance instruments appear too weak to stop the insistence of oligarchs at the top of these new technologies.
Technological change promoted the spread of democracy around the world as the rise of the urban working class proved indispensable to the economy and political systems adjusted to represent them. But if the work of common people becomes irrelevant, what will happen to the power of the people to influence the system of government?
Anton Korinek and Lee Lockwood of the University of Virginia prepared a primer with ideas How public finance can work In the AI era. He proposes that consumer taxes will fall first as labor income drops to zero. However, in a world dominated by artificial superintelligence, the footprint of human consumption would be reduced as most of the returns derived from machines’ economic production would be reinvested, leaving most of the burden to be taxed on capital.
Possibly taxes could also be used to slow the transition. Another idea, discussed by Korinek and Joe Stiglitz of Columbia University, is that in the early stages, when human labor retains its relevance, taxes could be used. drive technology investment towards technologies Help workers do their jobs better Instead of changing them. Korinek and Lockwood propose other taxes on fixed factors such as land, spectrum or data, or monopoly rents, which add nothing to the well-being of society.
it seems likely. The problem is that owners of these disruptive technologies must be convinced to do something that doesn’t come naturally to them: sharing. amount of taxes in usa less than 26% of GDP, 8 percentage points below the OECD average. Capital taxation is just over 2% of GDP. These numbers will have to increase even higher, as people will no longer have living wages and will be more dependent on government largesse.
Don’t hold your breath. The OECD’s global tax deal, set to be finalized in 2021, was designed to reduce the ability of US tech companies like Amazon, Google and Meta to engage in tax shifting by moving profits to the lowest tax jurisdictions. But while the Biden administration was broadly supportive of the deal, Donald Trump — whose campaign benefited from nearly $400 million in donations from various tech oligarchs — unilaterally withdrew in early 2025.
Given the scale and breadth of the expected AI revolution, unusual ideas may be required to keep society afloat. One would be to directly distribute the equity of artificial intelligence enterprises. The tax could be collected in shares rather than cash to allow for public ownership over time. Instead of taxing the returns on AI investments, a more radical proposal would be for the government to seize a portion of the equity in advance to redistribute among the population and directly give Americans a share in the promised cornucopia of AI.
Korinek and Lockwood wrote, “If AI development stalls, returns remain modest; if AI transforms the economy, returns are likely to increase.” “This automatic adjustment proves valuable given the radical uncertainty surrounding AI development.”
But these big ideas face big challenges. Governments will have to act before artificial intelligence becomes too big, which seems impossible in the current environment.
The technology oligarchs at the helm of this revolution have also vigorously resisted government efforts to curb their power or strip them of their cash. Despite their best efforts, Silicon Valley Nemesis Lena Kahn She was largely unable to break up tech monopolies during her tenure as President Joe Biden’s chief trustbuster as head of the Federal Trade Commission.
Meanwhile, Silicon Valley isn’t the only one with money mobilize vast resources To run American politics. As Plan B they are working to build their ownnetwork-states“, whether in greenland or Nigeria, honduras or caribbean nevis islandIf they cannot force their way under America’s democracy, then hope to avoid democratic rule.
Who knows what they might do when they have replaced all human labor. If artificial intelligence turns out to be as powerful as Silicon Valley elites expect it to be, the only available strategy for keeping us all fed in an after-work world may be to politely ask the moguls, hat in hand.
