[rich_sasha]

I guess the theory, really, is that it's funded by corporate taxes. The triad of key taxes is income, sales/VAT and corporate. Income, as you say, is out, so is sales (since it's paid by end consumers) so you're left with corporate. And I guess that's kind of what would happen if one day AI takes over. There will be masses of unemployable people, farms and mines and factories ran by computers, and we will all be funded by this.

Until that utopia comes around, I don't see any way to fund UBI, as you say.

[mike_hearn]

Taxes are all paid by people, ultimately, because it's people whose labor creates wealth. Corporate tax isn't some pool of money that would otherwise sit around not doing anything if not levied, as all profits eventually get paid out to individuals in one form or another. Corporate taxes are popular partly because people don't realize that (same reason governments love printing money), and partly because they're nice big static objects that find it harder to evade the tax man or move around.

AI doesn't change anything, no more than the internal combustion engine or computers did. There will still be plenty of jobs. AI has been around a few years now and hardly even impacted the job market! The effect will be like computers themselves, an uplift in the general welfare but give it 50 years and economists will be asking "where was the AI productivity boost?" just like they do with computers today.

What you find with UBI discussions is that the rationale for why it's going to be necessary constantly changes, and is always based on very dubious suppositions and extrapolations. UBI seems to be just a more respectable sounding version of /r/antiwork, when you boil it down.