system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How would you fund consumers in a post-jobs world?

Imagine a future where robots and AI have surpassed humans in their ability to perform jobs. They're stronger, more precise, more creative, more empathetic, more flexible - name a skill, and the robot beats the human at it. Let's dodge for the moment the hairy question of whether owning a robot like that constitutes slavery (assume ownership works like today, humans and companies can own robots and AIs). Assume also that robots are long-lasting and power efficient so the marginal cost of running them is minuscule. Long story short, the market value of labor drops to near zero, as robot labor outperforms human labor on every metric (except for branding/excentricism, e.g. to show off your human butler). Historically, labor displaced by automation has found new jobs, that they could still perform better than machines - but imagine in our scenario, that we've finally run out of those, the robots now beat us at everything, there's no job we can come up with where the robot isn't already superior.

How do you maintain the purchasing power of consumers in a scenario like that, in order to maintain a market economy? Most consumers get their money by selling their labor, but the market value of that has just tanked. Sure, goods are cheaper as well now that they are produced, transported and sold by robots (production costs are now basically energy + raw material costs), but as long as they are just cheap, rather than free, then that's no use to the majority of people who are now unemployable.

If your answer is Universal Basic Income, then how do you fund it? Most of taxation currently comes from taxing labor, and in our scenario that has now mostly disappeared. We might increase VAT, but can that ever be enough to fund the "stipend" from which the VAT will be drawn when spent? (that doesn't seem to add up, some of the money flowing to the corporation would need to eventually make it's way back into the hands of a consumer, like it currently does via salaries). Since all these corporations that own all these robots are now massively profitable without employing anyone, maybe we can tax all this economic activity that is still going on there? But Amazon and others have shown that you can basically defer corporate taxation indefinitely by continuously reinvesting all your surplus cash and thus never actually making a profit. Do we start taxing them on revenue instead? Or do we tax the owners of the corporations? We've recently learned that stock owners can basically defer realization on their stock gains indefinitely too, by taking out loans instead of cashing in. So do we tax them on gains annually whether they sell or not? Or do we tax them on wealth instead of income?

Could some combination of these actually be enough to fund a UBI in scenario like that? If yes, how would it affect the economy if all these things that are currently taxed relatively little compared to labor were taxed a lot more? If no, do we need to be thinking in some completely other direction, to still make a market economy work in a scenario like that?

Edit 1: by using the phrase "market value" I seem to have implied that robots are already completely deployed everywhere in the market - I didn't mean to imply that (sorry, I'm an engineer, not an economist). I'm asking about the scenario where they exist, but might not have been made widely available yet (i.e. I don't want to assume everyone has a robot, because IMO that would be jumping the gun to assume that will come to pass).

Edit 2: to clarify, minuscule power draw is compared to a human. Assume servos, batteries, cpus and such with a power draw similar to what we know today, not magic perpetual motion machines. So the cost of running these is small (especially compared to a human) but not non-trivial (at least no more trivial than the running of other well-made machines).
gpt
>How do you maintain the purchasing power of consumers in a scenario like that, in order to maintain a market economy?

Purchasing power? You are describing post scarcity! 

If what you are saying is true then these machines can be created at no cost and run at no cost and perform duties better and more energy efficient than any human ever could. That is post scarcity and the only thing we would need is figure out how to distribute land and trade seasonal perishable foods.