The standard way to discuss AI and employment is to reassure people. Technology has always created more jobs than it destroyed. The printing press, the industrial revolution, the internet, each disruption made the economy bigger and the workforce more productive. This time will be the same. John Chachas does not believe it.

Writing in FintechZoom, the founder of Methuselah Advisors and CEO of Inyo Broadcast Holdings makes a direct and pointed argument: artificial intelligence will destroy substantially more jobs than it creates, and the political system has no serious plan for what happens to the workers on the wrong side of that equation. His credentials make this hard to dismiss on ideological grounds. He has spent his career in investment banking, advising on major transactions including E.W. Scripps’ $2.65 billion acquisition of ION Media and the $18 billion buyout of Clear Channel Communications. He understands efficiency gains. He is not a Luddite.

The distinction he draws between “real jobs” and “make-work jobs” is central to his argument. A real job is one where a human being applies judgment, creativity, or expertise that a machine cannot replicate at lower cost. A make-work job is one that exists because society has not figured out what to do with the people displaced by automation. AI, in his view, will dramatically expand the second category while eliminating much of the first.

“Anyone arguing that AI is going to open a world of creative genius that presents more options for people, I do not see that,” Chachas says. “What does this mean for young people and their aspirations for work and progress? It means many fewer real jobs and many more ‘make-work’ jobs.” The scale of this matters. AI is not simply automating repetitive tasks. It is moving up the skills ladder into legal research, financial analysis, content production, and medical diagnostics.

His proposed response is a mandatory corporate contribution to a Universal Basic Income trust fund. Companies that deploy AI in ways that eliminate jobs would be automatically liable for contributions proportional to the displacement they cause. The logic is direct: the companies capturing the productivity gains should bear a proportional share of the social costs. “If corporations want to reap all the profits that AI can indeed produce, they will have to be compulsory funders of a UBI Trust Fund to pay for the millions of workers left out of the workforce,” he argues.

The congressional response so far has been minimal. A few bills addressing specific AI harms, deepfakes most notably, have passed. Comprehensive legislation addressing AI’s economic impacts has not materialized. AI capabilities, meanwhile, are advancing on a timeline measured in months. The mismatch between technological speed and political speed is itself a form of risk.

AI displacing workers faster than policy can respond is not a prediction about the far future. It is a description of what is happening now. Chachas is simply one of the few people positioned with both the industry credibility and the directness to say so clearly and publicly.