The article and the entire "AI will take all our jobs" doomer moment is idiotic. No one is losing their job to AI and no one will lose their job to AI in the long term without better jobs opening up in their place, same as every single technological innovation in history.
But humoring the author for a moment, and taking their argument to the extreme - let's say AI does take the majority of jobs, and taxes on human productivity aren't enough to sustain society anymore - so what? Isn't not having to work a good thing?
"But how will we pay for things without income taxes??" Why not the same way we did so for literally thousands of years of human history before this kind of taxation was a thing? Or the same way dozens of countries with no income tax do today? Consumption taxes, property taxes, wealth taxes, more efficient extraction and use of natural resources, trade, technological innovations.
The point is, there are plenty of ways for a society to collect revenue, reallocate wealth and balance the books. We don't have to all commit to back breaking labor for ~100% of our functional life just because this is the system most of us were born into and we don't know any better.
In those thousands of years of history, did we ever have multiple cities with populations over 10 million people? Did we have electricity demands? Were the agriculture/ food expectations the same?
Are you really trying to make the argument that if a significant chunk of the population is forced into unemployment, that's fine we'll just tax all the stuff that automated jobs away and it'll all just work out? Panic sets in if unemployment hits like 10% because of all the negative consequences it has on societal outcomes. Just assuming the government is gonna magically be able to reallocate resources it gets from taxing the automated systems that replace human work is a pretty insane thing to expect to work imo.
There are a hell of a lot of assumptions baked into your thinking that need to be explained and probably put under more scrutiny.
Take "We don't have to all commit to back breaking labor for ~100% of our functional life just because this is the system most of us were born into and we don't know any better" for example.
No we don't need to do manual labor 24/7, but what people generally do need is a purpose. Purpose here meaning something akin to meeting an expectation that they contribute to their own survival and to the benefit of society, even if abstractly. Take a look at most NEETs and I don't think you're going to find healthy thriving individuals, I think you're going to find people who are resigned to life and checked out. We didn't evolve to sit on our hands.
Layoffs are a symptom of our shit economy and rising interest rates. Companies have been doing constant rounds of layoffs since at least 2021. The only thing that has changed in the last ~year is that leadership includes "replaced with AI" in the layoff announcement so investors reward them for their "innovation" rather than penalize them for overhiring and missing targets, and employees direct blame to some faceless machine rather than actual people who screwed them over. The work is still being passed on to existing employees like always, and the $20/mo Copilot subscription they get is being immediately ignored.
So you are really going with the unreasonably optimistic take that wealth will actually be redistributed to those that don't have it? Take a look at the slums in India and other periods of history where the lower classes lived in squalor and let me know how confident you are.
That said, I do not think gen AI in its current incarnation is actually going to destroy everyone's jobs.
But humoring the author for a moment, and taking their argument to the extreme - let's say AI does take the majority of jobs, and taxes on human productivity aren't enough to sustain society anymore - so what? Isn't not having to work a good thing?
"But how will we pay for things without income taxes??" Why not the same way we did so for literally thousands of years of human history before this kind of taxation was a thing? Or the same way dozens of countries with no income tax do today? Consumption taxes, property taxes, wealth taxes, more efficient extraction and use of natural resources, trade, technological innovations.
The point is, there are plenty of ways for a society to collect revenue, reallocate wealth and balance the books. We don't have to all commit to back breaking labor for ~100% of our functional life just because this is the system most of us were born into and we don't know any better.