> It's an uncomfortable thought but one we must face up to if it is to be managed politically, economically and socially.

Call me a doomer, but I doubt there's anything we can actually do to stop mass inequality in a future dominated by AI.

I worry political options here won't work because people misunderstand the roots of political power today. What I'm about to say is a very clear idea in my head, but I struggle to explain it well.

In a democracy power is distributed to all citizens, but the reason this system is stable is because those citizens have real collective power.

Historically this power has been physical – no single entity had more physical might than the armed resistance of its collective citizens. But today that power is mostly economic. Politicians must appeal both to businesses and citizens to remain in power and businesses must appeal to people to sell their goods and services and to attract employees. The most powerful entity in a capitalist democracy is the people since they are both voters and consumers.

The issue I have is that if 95% of your population is unemployed there's no longer much value in people economically. Additionally whatever demand they have is purely artificial and coming from the state in the form of welfare.

We need to remember true value isn't money. Money is what we use to acquire resources that are truly valuable to us. Things like food, planes, oil and gold.

If those who have access to AI can now acquire these things without trading with humans or employing them then businesses no longer need to care about humans at all. Food can be acquired without humans. Jets can be built without humans. Oil can be drilled without humans. Etc...

Similarly politicians will find that if the reason they value money is so they can acquire resources and businesses can easily provide all the resource they might want then there's really no economic gain to represent the people.

In this AI dystopian world I imagine you'll have a handful of resource creating businesses and the owners of these businesses simply trade resources with each other.

An additional problem we face with say some kind of redistribution of AI created wealth is that businesses are not tied to any nation. Assuming our political systems can avoid corruption and issue a 99% tax on companies leverage AI they might as well just leave. Then you can say, well we'll nationalise the businesses instead then, which is fair enough, but then you have the corruption issues again because how would we humans collective prevent state corruption if we're literally all just a drain on the state's resources and have no physical way to resist? Why wouldn't the state just say screw these leaches if that's what is in their economic interest?

Like I say, I can't explain this idea very well so sorry for this long rambly comment, but to try to end on something constructive here I think what we need to be thinking about now isn't what the correct rate of tax is in a world of AI, but how do we ensure people retain their collective power against businesses and the state? If we have no collective power then we should assume that with time any solution we try to implement will fail.