You might be on the right track. We've been selling these ideas to the people who already want them, we need to expand the market!

I think that if people get to have Universal Basic Income, and society can be arranged to provide it without causing big problems to society, then it doesn't need to be tied to Automation in any way, and instead can simply be viewed as a core benefit of being a member of society. That seems like a more elegant approach.

People would not want to be told 'oh, it seems like we are going to scale back automation some, so everyone is going to only get 50% of the UBI they have been receiving previously'.

I fully agree with this, but I'm of the belief that in order to fund it, we need to tax the "labor" that companies are saving with AI. If a company names profit normally with humans, they are creating a system in which the government is getting paid twice, once on the income of the company and once on the income of the people. But if AI just takes half of that away, the country is missing out on trillions of tax dollars.

So what's the plan? Require all companies to disclose their electric bills and what they used that power for. If it's AI? Tax them a rate dependent on the size of the company and the size of the AI portion. This has the additional benefit of incentivizing companies to simply hire people again.

This will never happen but I can dream.

What I've seen as the most talked about part of this is, how are we going to pay for it. Of course, wealth tax has to be a huge part of it. We've seen the following work, so it's not hard to understand. The billionaires don't want it:

• Social Security, but the companies only are the ones to foot the bill
• Alaska dividends, same concept but of course, a lot more money.
• Medicare, Medicaid and people on disability.