TFA ignores that the economic question of whether AIs will take every job depends not only on whether they are capable of doing them, but also the cost of doing them.

If it's cheaper to hire an old-fashioned human to do job X, humans will keep those jobs. And although tokens are cheap now, remember that right now all the frontier AI companies are flooding the market with tokens well below cost to build a user base; they absolutely need to raise prices eventually to recoup their investors' money, the only question is when and by how much.

What if AI remains cheaper than human labour across the board, regardless of token price increases? Well, why not tax tokens? It's a win-win: The government gets flexible control over which jobs remain economic for humans to do and is able introduce changes much more slowly and safely, while it's much more palatable than a hard ban for companies who currently get a big benefit out of AI.

Yes, this would mean additional government bureaucracy -- but it's far from impossible. Every country in the world already has a comparable functioning bureaucracy: their ordinary income tax system.

What if some countries opt not to introduce such a tax, in a bid to get ahead? This is a problem if there are many such countries, or even a few large ones -- but if the majority of world economies can see the sense in this tax, leaving only a handful of small "AI tax havens", I think the world economy will survive. And agreeing on some level of tax seems much more realistic than trying to get a global agreement on banning AI outright.

When I suggested this approach in another comment recently, it was downvoted but there were no comments. I hope anyone who sees an issue with it will expand on their reasons in a reply.