Your thoughts seem to have some similarity to the writings of Richard Wolff (WSDE, Worker self-directed enterprises, essentially cooperatives). AFAIU Noam Chomsky is also advocating similar stuff. Though not in the context of vast unemployment caused by AI/automation.
But yeah, if it turns out that the AI/automation revolution leaves vast numbers of people unemployed, we're in for some drastic social upheaval. Hopefully it will not result in a repeat of the bloodbaths of the 20th century communist revolutions.
You've correctly identified some of my heaviest influences. ;)
I've met Richard Wolff and have read his book Democracy at Work (which he signed). I'm also interested in what Gar Alperovitz talks about among others.
Chomsky has talked at length about automation. AI is a new one, but even back in the 1960's Martin Luther King Jr was talking about how to overcome the problems of automation. This Noam Chomsky interview [1] from 1976 talks about his belief in something like The Machine. He says that it makes sense for an advanced technological society to automate away the drudgery of survival. He goes further to elaborate how work that can't be automated could be shared amongst the people rather than relegating one class of society to do that work. In a way, deciding not to have class suddenly means you want to automate as much as possible, because in either case you don't want to do the hard work yourself. We can only maintain a class based society because we're satisfied making some people do work we don't want to do.
What I write about, is how you can make your society in to sort of a small closed system, where there becomes a fixed number of things needed to maintain a certain standard of living. People can then decide if that standard of living is better than life in the more traditional worker-based capitalist system, where most people end up being workers. And to reiterate - the system I'm describing still meets the definition of "capitalist" by most western libertarian standard, because it is still based on voluntarily agreed contracts and depends on the notion of private property (shares) to operate. It also necessarily requires economic (capitalist) exchange to the outside world to get things the society cannot itself produce. It's an engineering solution, in my mind, to what Chomsky and others talk about.
But yeah, if it turns out that the AI/automation revolution leaves vast numbers of people unemployed, we're in for some drastic social upheaval. Hopefully it will not result in a repeat of the bloodbaths of the 20th century communist revolutions.