No one knows if AI will destroy more jobs than it creates, render less educated or less intelligent people unemployed, drive innovation that creates new classes of jobs, or ends up creating wealth so vast that supporting the unemployed will be an easily solved blip on the world economy.  Indeed, with the whole world scheduled to lose population to a significant degree by 2100 (see a recent exhaustive study of this in the Economist), fewer jobs may not be a big problem and the young will be employed caring both economically and physically for the increasing cadre of older people preserved by modern science.  (Assuming we are not all fried by global warming, in which case you need not read the balance of this post.)

AI creates tools that solve methods of achieving a task.  It does not necessarily replace the job that requires the performance of that task.  Perhaps one approach would be to regulate AI so it produces task-performance tools only; could the government require that each class of significant AI advance make jobs easier to perform but not be projected to reduce total employment to below the size of the relevant job pool?  (I am not sure if this is Communism, but it surely isn’t modern capitalism, so this solution would require a radically new social compact.)  Could this lead to reduced work weeks along with a shrinking employment pool of young people?

History has taught us that technology can cause dislocations harmful to many workers for somewhat lengthy periods of time, but the industrial economy overall has survived, short of total collapse of human society.  However, history is not a guarantee, just a frame of analysis.  Should we be encouraged by the fundamentally social nature of homo sapiens, that a machine can give you the answer but you need a human being to tell you, very often, what the machine said in order to create peace of mind and confidence and social bonding with ancillary benefits?

Or will we become as a total population machine-friendly, and at what cost?  Could being machine-friendly mean that we cease caring about useful employment as part of human DNA?  This latter result would be a stunning readjustment of who we are, requiring such a long evolutionary cycle that those of us alive today are generations, likely millennia, away from having to think about that result.