The AI Tax: What Progress Takes

Evan Cole thought he knew exactly what automation would cost him - until a lying green light on a kitchen display line cost strangers their health, and cost him everything he believed about his own judgment.Within a year, Evan, his partner Lora, and his oldest friend Drew have built something the world has no name for yet: an underground treasury that quietly punishes the companies profiting from displaced workers, and redistributes what it takes to the people automation left behind. No one gets hurt. That's the rule. That's the whole rule.Rules don't survive contact with scale.As their operation spreads from a spare bedroom to across continents, drawing in strangers they can no longer vet and consequences they can no longer contain, a journalist named Priest starts asking the one question no official statement will answer: not what happened, but why nobody built something to catch these people before they fell.The AI Tax is a novel about the debt progress leaves behind - and the three ordinary people who decided, catastrophically, to collect it themselves.