Nowhere near reality here. While there might be programs that can write some programs in a very limited sense (makefiles count here), that does *not* mean that programs can write unrelated programs. More to the point, writing code is one of the most simple acts in IT. All the hard parts are interactions with humans - finding what the user thinks they want, determining what they *really* want, determining what they need to make those wants happen, converting those wants & needs into logic, writing some code to implement said logic, testing, testing, and more testing. AI will never be able to convert user needs into a program spec until the AI has human-like context and memory capabilities, something that is not expected to happen for at least 2 (human) generations. And none of this gets into any of the jobs that still require interaction within the real world. We're always going to need police (from beat cops to detectives). We're always going to need politicians. I agree that very-long-term (6 generations or so) capitalism could very well be outdated, but that's not our job to fix, and we have no clear idea what the social situation will be at that time so we have no way to attempt to fix it. All we can do is set the framework for the early transition by keeping as many people employed as possible, and believe me there will be plenty of IT jobs needing filling. We just need to create high-quality applicants.

Forgot to mention: UBI, while a cool concept, cannot work when there is nothing to fund it. In particular, the concept is impossible when 25-50% of the workforce is unemployed.

The problem of unemployment due to automation is constrained by the limits of available programmers. So on the one hand we have business who need humans to program stuff, and on the other hand we have a lot of unemployed people. If we can find a way to retrain our workers we might be able to avoid most of the problem.

IMHO, 3-pronged approach to dealing with the problem of unemployment due to automation:
1) Long-term: extend public education to college-level, make programming courses (and/or IT QA courses) mandatory at all levels and majors. This will protect our children.
2) Mid-term: provide free night classes (remote or community college, etc) in programming/QA at all levels. Make it as easy as possible to get the workforce retrained. This will protect our current generation.
3) Reform tax plan: Merge exemptions & standard deductions, raise to $35k, and tax all remaining income at 30%. Applies to individuals and corporations. Half of the US population pays no taxes, individual tax revenue for the govt stays the same, and corp tax revenue for the govt increases quite a bit. These changes will finally help the population get a handle on the tax code, and the extra money can be used to help fund the increased education costs.

Anyone who's interested in the hard details can go to https://medemaforprez.com/#Tax...