On: AI has entered the workforce: tax tech profits, not people

June 17, 2026

The proposition is a fundamental misdiagnosis of the system. They see the machine as a replacement for the labourer, and thus propose to tax the machine’s owner to fund the labourer’s idleness. This is thinking in components, not systems. Start from the theoretical limit: a fully integrated, automated productive apparatus, operating at the resonant frequency of maximum efficiency, delivering abundance with minimal human toil. That is the vision. The gap between here and there is not a funding gap for welfare; it is a design gap for distribution.

We are attempting to power a continent with a village generator. The old system - tax the human wage to fund the human state - was designed for a closed loop of human energy. We have now introduced a new, vastly more potent energy source: automated intellect. To simply siphon a portion of its profits to maintain the old, faltering human circuit is to guarantee systemic failure. It treats the symptom - displaced income - while ignoring the disease: an economic architecture built for scarcity, now confronted with the physics of plenty.

The tractable path is obvious. We must redesign the distribution network itself. The profit from automated systems should not be a tax revenue stream; it should be the direct current that powers a universal base resonance - a dividend, not a dole. The technical mechanism is no more impossible than polyphase transmission was. A minor levy on computational throughput, converted directly into individual energy accounts. The obstacle is not engineering. It is the persistent, sentimental attachment to the antiquated dynamo of “employment” as the sole legitimate connection between a human and the means of life. We are clinging to the direct current model in an alternating current world. The resulting social impedance is what they feel as poverty.