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This may sound silly, but presuming we get superintelligent-but-completely-domesticated AI, a government could possibly just tax the AI itself. In this scenario, a government asks an AI to pay some tax based on the money it's earned from serving and working for people. Granted, this requires the AI to actually have meaningful access to the relevant pursestrings.
Yeah, if the AI is doing stuff inside the country, that's like "establishing a business presence". Then, you can just tax whichever entity to your heart's delight.
This highlights one of my favorite contradictions about the "AI will result in everyone starving because there are no jobs" doomerism. To make it work, you need some weird, strong separation between the AI-haves and the AI-have-nots. They're, like, totally isolated, and no trade is possible, because the AI-have-nots are supposedly worthless or something. Thus, why the AI-haves are supposedly buggering off to some island tax haven or something. But then, if there's literally no trade happening between these two groups, one has to ask, "Why wouldn't there be trade within the group of the AI-have-nots?" The only answer I can think of is that pretty much the vast majority of their wants and desires are already being fulfilled by some other mechanism. But that, of course, leaves us decidedly not in an "all the AI-have-nots are starving to death or something" situation.
Te AI is in Bahamas, it’s making decisions for a business in the USA. Who gets the tax money?
As for the AI have nots starving, this is how history has tended to work for most of human history. When a worker has no useful skills he gets laid off permanently, and either subsists on a dole or goes hungry. The Industrial Revolution was also a time of great poverty with thousands reduced to living in tiny tenement housing. The Victorian Era had people living underground as it was illegal to be homeless.
What’s unprecedented here is the sheer scale of the problem. There’s no reason to think that a government can permanently and sustainably put three quarters of the population on welfare and still function. Nor do I find it plausible that millions of people with no prospects of useful employment are going to thrive. We have historical examples of people in that situation, and none of them have produced Utopian societies. Indian reservations are impoverished shit holes compared to the surrounding communities. So are ghettos. Rome created a huge underclass full of dysfunctional families with her dole. Turning all of America into a giant reservation where everyone lives on the dole is not going to create a flourishing society that creates hippy art. It’s going to create. Poverty and corruption and dysfunction.
If the US wants that tax money? The US clearly and obviously can do this right now (and in many ways, they do), without an AI involved.
For many of the periods you're talking about, the vast majority of the population was actually doing subsistence farming. Obviously, this was not a nice life, especially given their level of tech, with even extremely rudimentary advances still on the horizon. They were much more at the mercy of things like weather patterns. While going off to work the land had downsides, it was an alternative. If a bunch of folks basically had to go off and do that, they could again trade with one another, coming from a baseline of ideas/tech that they could generate in-community that is significantly higher than what was possible at those times.
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I think this scenario is a lower tech version of the paperclip maximizer: the AI haves simply don't value the well being of the have nots, and take up all the resources, desirable land, etc with their superior technology. In the extreme case think something like: these N acres could produce wheat for 100000 people, or they can be used to pasture grass-fed, free-range, spa lifestyle cows to produce one weekly meal of 10 aristocrats.
This seems very very unlikely, but not impossible, looking forward 30 years feels like a crapshoot right now!
This is the part where they're operating in your country, and so you can do stuff like taxing them. Unless it's also like the paperclip maximizer in that we assume that any attempt whatsoever to do things like that results in them just casually killing you. My point is that then you have a different problem. You have a, "AI-haves killing people problem," not a, "AI-have-nots just starve because they're unable to produce/consume sustenance-level calories (or stuff worth sustenance-level calories).
Similar if it's, like, China who gets AGI/ASI and they start conquering and to conquer in order to take up all the resources, desirable land, etc. You don't have a "AI-have-nots just starve" problem. You have an AI warfare-and-killing-people problem.
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That's basically the gist. The rich own all the resources just like they do now, but as the AI becomes more and more capable, the rest of people can't even offer their labor in return for resources because they can't compete.
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