You're measuring value in human beings in terms of productive capacity. Speed, efficiency, work output. And if that is your metric, yeah, humans lose to AI. Obviously. But why is that the metric?
Economies do not exist in the natural world. They're human creations intended to organize the distribution of resources. We built them, which means we can build them differently. The fact that we're creating economic systems where human labor will be obsolete. That's a choice, not a law of physics.
And the elite-plus-AI scenario I mean, okay.
What then? They live in automated luxury while all others are. What, exactly? Dies off? Gets warehoused? The scenario doesn't actually make sense since elites need an economy to be elite within. Wealth is relative. Power is relational. You can't be elite in a vacuum.
But more than that, you're assuming that AI capability is what determines social organization. It doesn't. Social organization is political. We could use AI to shorten working hours, without the income being reduced. We could use it to do dangerous jobs while humans do creative work. We could design systems in which AI augments, rather than replaces.
We're not doing that because of the distribution of power, so much as we're doing that because of technical limits.
None of this is inevitable.
To be fair that is what the UBI stands for, universal basic income. What the idea suggests is that when the rich are so rich that they do not even need us anymore, we could just stay at our homes. This means rich will be fighting off against other rich, and they will all be paying high amount of taxes because they will be the ones with all the money, and we will just be getting some standard pay, and with that money, rich will compete against each other to get it.
So if you get lets say 1200 dollars a month UBI now, amazon and tesla will fight over who will get your 1200 and that's how they will try to get richer. While this makes no sense in the current world we live in, believe me, with the ways are moving, maybe one day it could make sense.