The crux of this entire issue surrounding replacing people with agents, is that agents should pay taxes. If we're losing people that pay taxes our social safety nets will crumble. Maybe that makes the math more in favor of actually using humans too.
The people who make the rules (by brainwashing the population through a trillion dollar advertising industry what would make Pravda blush) only want to help themselves. As long as they have enough toys to prevent a French Revolution or for other people to take their wealth, they’re happy.
200 years ago, even 1000 years ago, the rich had to live in the same towns as the masses so they did actually put effort into keeping them nice. Building amenities, providing jobs, etc.
They don’t have to do that now. Power extends far beyond a 20 mile radius. They don’t have to go anywhere near the people.
Of course, if those max amounts of things have few consumers because most people are just too poor to afford them, that'd make companies (or the agents that run companies) think twice too. At some point these AI agents might work together to come up with an economic system to make it possible for society to afford their products so they could further grow.
I think a resource consumption based tax model extends very neatly to a UBI model. One could think of as: "this is the basic resource consumption we allow each person" and it automatically generates demand for basic services everyone should be able to afford with their share of resources, while keeping a free market and allowing an economy on top with extra resources. Standard money could still be the means for value exchange, just taxing works differently.
We need UBI. Taxes are still there anyway, company income/profit tax, VAT, and maybe we can have other taxes too for automatically-generate income, same as with investments/dividend/gambling tax and stuff.
Just remove the moral obligations the penning class felt they had in the 19th century.