I’ve had a lot on my mind because people keep telling me that AI agents are taking over. And I’m like, sure, but what’s next?
When an agent takes a job, the taxes on that paycheck disappear too. Over the last four posts, I followed that money. The paycheck has a second job, which is funding the public, and when agents do the work, we have to decide what replaces it. This is the whole series, in order.
Part One: The Paycheck Was the Tax System
Government runs on your paycheck. I used North Carolina as a case study. Just under half of the state’s General Fund comes from personal income tax, and most of that is withholding. An agent doesn’t get a W-2, so when a company swaps a person for an agent, the state loses that money. The state’s own forecasters have flagged AI as a risk, and North Carolina keeps cutting its tax rate while agents shrink the base. Washington can borrow through a bad decade. States can’t. Read Part One.
Part Two: The Token Tax
A lot of smart people want to tax tokens, the unit AI companies use to bill their work. The problem is that tokens measure how much a computer runs. They can’t tell you who lost a job or what that loss costs a community. Two agents haggling over a hotel block both pay, while a company that laid off forty people barely shows up on the bill. Someone has to make the call about whether an agent replaced a person or helped one, and that call has usually belonged to HR. Read Part Two.
Part Three: Where HR Goes
As agents take over more work, HR shrinks inside companies. A small team stays to own the hard calls about agents, and the rest of us should follow the people, into public service. Workforce boards, labor departments, school boards, and city councils are about to make huge decisions about work, and many of the people making them have never run a layoff. It’s a pay cut, and it’s worth it. And maybe one day the cut will be offset by UBI. Read Part Three.
Part Four: Universal Basic Income
We need a floor before we can have a conversation about the future of work responsibly, and Universal Basic Income (UBI) could be that floor. It’s a regular payment to every adult, with no strings attached, and you still work for everything above it. With a floor in place, people can do work because it matters, like caregiving, teaching, public service, and the hard problems nobody has solved yet. Read Part Four.
One More Thing About UBI
Will UBI drive up costs if everybody has money? It might. My high school civics teacher told me that inflation is what happens when rich people feel like their money is worth less, and we saw that during COVID, or at least that’s how it felt. If everybody has money and wants a new flat-screen TV, why wouldn’t we raise prices? That’s just the American capitalist thing to do. Rich get richer. Poor get a new LG flat-screen that spies on them.
The same thing can be said for healthcare. If everyone gets it and demand is high, wouldn’t that just make dentists and eye doctors charge more for the privilege of being seen by a human? If everyone gets housing, doesn’t that drive up demand and hit up against inventory?
We’ll have to sort all of it out. None of it’s in a vacuum, and that’s why we need smart people like you to cleave yourself from that shitty paycheck and start working on solving real problems.
That’s the promise of agents doing the busy work, and that’s the promise realized if we can couple those agents with something like UBI.
I’ve said for years that HR sits at the intersection of work, power, politics, and money. Agents are changing all four. The people who understand how work works should help decide what comes next. That’s my dream for you, and it’s my dream for myself.
Sign the Pledge
If this series made you uneasy, good. Do something with it. Read and sign the AI Pledge for Humanity.