But the same technology reads as a catastrophe one field over. Ask an illustrator, a voice actor, or a screenwriter how AI is going and you won’t hear “more room to explore.” You’ll hear that the thing they spent a life learning to do was scraped to train the tool, and now the tool undercuts their rate and, in a growing number of jobs, replaces them.

Because the AI companies not only stole the training data but are also giving away their services for free or selling them far below cost: unsustainable either way. Predatory pricing is criminal but no one is stopping the AI companies. Rather, when the losses come home to roost, it will be the pension and index funds that lose. The companies and their billionaire owners will be bailed out by the governments.

Given wages are determined by supply and demand, and AI is causing the demand for labor to go down, the only logical outcome to keep wages at a reasonable level is to reduce the supply.

It seems the two easiest ways to do this is to reduce the work week from 40 hours to 32 (or even less) and to tax AI data center power consumption to fund public goods such as child care and housing.