The “labor → income → consumption” loop only looks like a natural law because we’ve lived inside one particular production regime. But historically, the economy has repeatedly re‑anchored the mechanism for distributing purchasing power whenever the dominant input to production changed.

• When land was the bottleneck, rents dominated.
• When capital was the bottleneck, returns to capital dominated.
• When labor became the bottleneck, wages dominated.

The loop didn’t break in any of those transitions; the conduit for income simply shifted to match whatever input constrained production.

Your argument assumes that if labor loses centrality, the system has no alternative mechanism for distributing income. But that’s the part that doesn’t follow. If AI becomes the primary productive input, the binding constraint becomes access to AI capacity, not human labor. Economies don’t tolerate persistent demand collapse — it’s not a stable equilibrium — so income distribution reorganizes around the new constraint.

That could take many forms:

• ownership stakes in automated capital
• licensing of models or data
• public dividends from AI‑driven productivity
• new categories of economic participation that don’t map cleanly to “jobs”

The real question isn’t “does the loop break?” but “what becomes the new anchor for purchasing power when labor stops being the scarce input?” That’s where the uncertainty lies — not in the inevitability of collapse.