Going Dutch on the AI Apocalypse

Nederlandse versie

March 2029. Albert Heijn, the Dutch equivalent of Kroger, in Haarlem, a city just west of Amsterdam. Tuesday afternoon. The security guard sees them coming from across the parking lot and locks the sliding doors from the inside. It doesn’t help. The glass goes in two seconds. By the time the police arrive, forty minutes later, the store is empty. Not looted, empty. Even the shelving is gone. The same thing is happening at the Albert Heijn in Heemstede, the Jumbo in Haarlem-Noord, the Lidl in Zandvoort. Every supermarket in the region, simultaneously. The police took forty minutes because they were somewhere else, doing the same thing at a different store.

I grew up in Haarlem.

The wave is here

AI is no longer a prediction. It’s installed. It’s in your bank, your doctor’s office, the logistics company that delivers your packages, the law firm that drew up your mortgage. The supermarket checkouts in the Netherlands are half self-service already, and the other half will go when the next lease cycle ends. Customer service at the national telecom is mostly an AI that sounds like a person. The junior analyst job at ING, the big Dutch bank, doesn’t exist anymore. Neither does the paralegal job at the major Dutch law firms, or the copywriter job at any advertising agency in Amsterdam. These jobs didn’t get exported. They got absorbed.

And this is the slow part.

The robots are coming next. Not the robots from science fiction, the robots that are already walking around in demo videos from Boston Dynamics, Figure, Unitree, and a dozen Chinese companies you haven’t heard of yet. One of them can work three shifts instead of one, including weekends. It doesn’t call in sick. It doesn’t join a union. The port of Rotterdam is already partially automated. The APM terminal on Maasvlakte II, one of the largest container terminals in Europe, has been running with almost no humans for years. That model is about to spread to every warehouse, every distribution center, every construction site.

The hardware timeline is the part skeptics bail on. A humanoid robot at factory scale is a bill of materials problem, not a physics problem. Electric motors, batteries, sensors, and compute have all been on exponential cost curves for a decade. The unit economics work out somewhere around the end of the decade for advanced economies, and a few years after that for developing ones. You don’t have to believe my numbers. You only have to believe that the cost curve keeps going the direction it has been going since 2015. If it does, the transition from demo video to factory floor is a matter of years, not decades. And the first company that crosses that line forces every competitor to cross it too, or die.

March 2029. A family of four has been living on the fourteenth floor of an empty office tower on the Zuidas, the financial district of Amsterdam, for six weeks now. The tower is empty because the white-collar workers who filled it don’t exist anymore. The family is there because they can’t pay rent anywhere else. There are about sixty other families in the same building. No one is trying very hard to evict them. The owner is a pension fund that is also trying to figure out what to do with several billion euros worth of suddenly worthless office real estate.

What the Dutch have that no one else does

The country already has a universal tax authority, the Belastingdienst, which knows every adult in the country by name, address, and bank account. It already has a state payment infrastructure, the Sociale Verzekeringsbank, that sends monthly payments to millions of people, no problem. It already has universal healthcare, so that part doesn’t need to be solved. It has a small population and a short list of languages. It has the famous polder model, the consensus-building tradition that drained half the country and kept the sea out for four centuries, which is not dead, just asleep.

And then the political piece. In October 2025, the Dutch held a snap election after yet another government collapse. The winning party, D66, led by a 38-year-old named Rob Jetten, had something in its manifesto that no governing party in Europe has ever run on: an “individueel basisbedrag.” An individual basic amount. It is UBI in all but name. Jetten became prime minister in February 2026. He is the youngest prime minister in Dutch history and the first openly gay one. His coalition includes parties that hate the idea, so the plan in the coalition agreement is watered down from what D66 actually proposed. But the word basisbedrag is now in a Dutch government agreement. That has never happened before, anywhere.

Put it all together: the infrastructure, the money, the history, the prime minister who campaigned on it, and a population that has been softened up by the worst welfare scandal in modern Dutch history. No other country has anything like this combination. Germany is tangled in federalism. France will have to fight its unions over the restructuring. Italy has the political volatility to do anything and undo it six months later. The UK is still recovering from a decade of self-inflicted institutional damage. The US is ideologically committed to the idea that suffering builds character. The Nordic countries have the infrastructure but are distracted by their own problems. Out of the countries that might try this, the Netherlands is the one where the starting conditions are not actively working against you.

The Netherlands will probably still fail.

You can’t stop it

Ban it. Regulate it. Tax it into submission. I wish it worked. It doesn’t.

It doesn’t work for the same reason no country has ever successfully banned electricity, or the internal combustion engine, or the internet. The moment one country gets an advantage from a technology, every other country has to adopt it or become poor. If the Netherlands bans AI and Germany doesn’t, every Dutch export business dies. If Europe bans AI and China doesn’t, Europe becomes a museum. This is not a moral argument. It’s a mechanical one. The first country to automate its economy has a cost advantage that compounds every year. The second country either follows or stops being a country in any meaningful sense.

And that’s just the external pressure. There’s also the internal kind. Every CEO in the Netherlands right now is looking at two numbers: the cost of replacing a given employee with AI, and the cost of not doing so while the competition does. The second number is always bigger. Always. A Dutch CEO who refuses to automate is not a hero, she’s an ex-CEO, replaced by a board who found someone less sentimental.

So we are not going to stop it. We are not going to slow it down either, much. The most we can do is prepare for it. And preparing for it means deciding, now, what happens to the people whose jobs disappear.

March 2030. The port of Rotterdam is shut down for the ninth day in a row. Ex-dockworkers, ex-truckers, ex-warehouse staff. They know exactly which chokepoints matter because they built them. Food is no longer moving through the port. Germany is furious. Belgium is opening its ports to traffic that used to come through Rotterdam and will now never come back. The Dutch government has sent in the military police. The military police are mostly sympathetic to the blockaders, because their brothers-in-law are on the picket line.

UBI, briefly

Universal Basic Income. Everyone gets a check every month. No means test, no forms, no caseworker, no humiliation. Rich people get it too, and then pay it back through taxes. The amount is enough to live on. Not enough to live well, but enough to eat, have a roof, and not starve.

That’s it. That’s the whole idea.

People have been arguing about UBI for sixty years. Milton Friedman liked a version of it. Martin Luther King Jr. endorsed it. The Dutch historian Rutger Bregman has written a book about it. The Dutch city of Utrecht ran a pilot. Finland ran a pilot. The results of the pilots were boring, which is exactly what you want from a social program: people didn’t stop working, they didn’t spend it all on drugs, they were slightly happier and slightly healthier and the administrators noticed they had a lot less paperwork to do.

The simplest possible version looks like this. Every adult with a Dutch social security number gets €1,200 per month. Children get €400. It starts on a specific date. The money comes from a raised corporate tax rate and a raised VAT, the Dutch equivalent of sales tax. The existing welfare benefits do not get consolidated at the same time, because that fight will take ten years the country doesn’t have. UBI and the old welfare system run in parallel. People on welfare still get welfare. People on the state pension still get the state pension. UBI is on top. Yes, this costs more. Yes, it is inelegant. Yes, it could be better. There is no time to make it better. Version two can fix it.

That’s the whole program. The Dutch tax authority can implement this in eighteen months if you hand them the law tomorrow morning. They could probably do it faster if they were allowed to.

Version two, five years later, consolidates the benefits. Version three adjusts for regional cost of living. Version four figures out the EU free-movement question, which is the genuinely hard one: do EU citizens living in the Netherlands get it? After how long? None of that has to be solved now. None of it. The entire game is to get money flowing to people before the breakdown starts, and then clean up the design once there is breathing room.

This is close to, but not the same as, what the Jetten government is currently proposing. Their version is smaller, more tangled, more hedged, designed to replace the current toeslagen system rather than sit on top of it, and it will probably take most of the parliamentary term to legislate. The emergency version above is a cruder sibling of the Jetten plan, stripped down and sped up. If the Jetten plan passes in roughly its current form, the Netherlands will have done something genuinely historic. If the plan dies in committee, which is also possible, the emergency version is still sitting there waiting to be written.

March 2030. The Microsoft data center in Middenmeer, about an hour north of Amsterdam, is on fire. Not a metaphor, actually on fire. Someone cut the perimeter fence, rolled three drums of diesel up to the generator intakes, and walked away. There is a video on Telegram. The people in the video are not masked. They do not appear to care that they are not masked. One of them waves at the camera. The Google campus up in Eemshaven, on the northern coast, has tripled its security budget. The Google campus in Eemshaven does not feel safer.

Why they will probably miss

The Jetten government is a minority coalition. It has to find extra votes on every single bill. On basisbedrag, those votes have to come from one of two directions, and neither is free. The parties to the left support the general idea but are furious about the rest of the coalition agreement, which cuts benefits they spent decades building, and they will not hand Jetten a legacy-defining win while he’s also rolling back their priorities. The parties on the political right are split. Some are ideologically opposed to the idea of unconditional money on principle. Others might support a simplified single-payment version if it looks enough like a tax reform and not enough like a basic income, but will vote against anything that gives money to immigrants, and the simplest version of UBI does. The parties inside the coalition hate the idea more than they admit and spent the coalition negotiation watering it down into something conditional and means-tested, closer to a restructured welfare benefit than a true basic income. They will push back at every stage of implementation.

And then there is the civil service itself. The toeslagenaffaire, the Dutch tax authority’s multi-year scandal of falsely accusing tens of thousands of families, many of them immigrants, of childcare benefits fraud and destroying their lives, is not over. It is still being cleaned up. The total compensation has now passed nine billion euros. The civil service that would have to implement UBI is the same civil service that ran the toeslagenaffaire, and they are terrified of being blamed for another systemic disaster. They are going to demand that any new program be perfect on day one, which means it will never ship.

The Dutch tax authority could ship UBI by 2028. The Dutch parliament cannot agree on what to have for lunch. Jetten’s government could fall before the reform lands.

And this is the country with the tools.

March 2030. The police officer at the station in Amsterdam West hasn’t been paid in two months. The municipal payroll system is working fine, actually. The municipal treasury just doesn’t have the money. The tax base has collapsed because half the workforce is unemployed and the other half is underpaid because wages collapsed when labor became abundant. He takes off his uniform and goes home. He is the seventh one on his shift to do this in the last six weeks. His commander does not report it, because his commander is also considering it.

What Dutch failure looks like elsewhere

The Dutch collapse is polite by international standards. Supermarkets sacked. Squatters in the financial district. Dockworkers blockading Rotterdam. Cops walking off the job. Not fascism in the 1930s sense, a slow-motion collapse of competence. The trains run less often. The ambulances take longer. The schools hire less qualified teachers. The hospitals have longer waits. Over a decade, the Netherlands becomes a place that reminds old people of the 1970s, then a place that reminds them of nowhere they’ve ever been.

Germany does not have a universal payment infrastructure. Sixteen federal states, each with its own welfare bureaucracy, each with its own veto. An industrial base larger and more exposed to automation than the Dutch one. An opposition already polling above thirty percent in parts of the east. A coalition tradition that moves half as fast as the Dutch one on its best day. In Germany the equivalent of the Haarlem Albert Heijn is not a sacked supermarket. It is a sacked neighborhood.

France has a centralized state that can in theory move quickly, and a civil service and union movement that will strike before they will implement, and a presidential system that makes every reform a referendum on the president. The French Rotterdam blockade is not nine days. It is six months, and it is national.

The UK has payment infrastructure that exists but has been hollowed out for fifteen years, and the political capacity to design a new universal program has been hollowed out for longer. The British equivalent of the family on the Zuidas is a family on the fourteenth floor of a tower in Canary Wharf with no heat, and the elevator hasn’t worked in three weeks.

The United States has fifty states, no federal payment infrastructure worth the name, a political culture that treats unconditional money as an insult to human dignity, and enough private firearms to arm every adult twice over. The American data center in flames is not a video on Telegram of unmasked men waving at the camera.

If the Netherlands fails, every other country fails harder.

What to do

The Dutch have the tools and they are about to sleepwalk through the window. The job of anyone Dutch who can do anything about it, at any level, is to stop the sleepwalk.

If you are Dutch, push the Jetten government to hold the line on the basisbedrag as the coalition partners water it down further. Write to your MPs. Show up. Apathy is the opposition’s most valuable resource and you are not obligated to donate yours.

If you work in government, refuse the paralysis. If you are a civil servant in the finance ministry or social affairs, start drafting the version two and version three plans now, before anyone asks. The order to prepare isn’t coming until the crisis is too advanced to fix, and by then it will be too late. Your caution about being blamed for the next toeslagenaffaire is understandable. Your caution about being blamed for the collapse of Dutch society should also weigh on you.

If you are a journalist, stop writing about this as if basisbedrag is a minor tax policy detail. It is the most important thing the Dutch government will attempt this decade. Treat it like the emergency it is.

If you are a politician, stop triangulating. Your grandchildren are going to ask you what you did during the collapse. “I was worried about alienating my base” is not going to be a good answer.

If you are not Dutch, don’t hold your breath waiting for the Netherlands to solve this for you. The country with the working payment infrastructure and the sitting PM who campaigned on basic income is probably going to miss the window anyway. Not because the Dutch are lazy or stupid, but because the problem is genuinely harder than the political systems we inherited were designed to handle, and having the tools is not the same as using them.

Start now. In your own country. With whatever materials you have. The window is shorter than it looks, and the wave is the same size everywhere.

There are maybe four years. Probably less. The country with the tools to do this is about to sleepwalk right through the window and out the other side.

Wake up.

This essay is about what governments should do. If you're wondering what your household can do regardless of what governments decide, that's the subject of my book:
The Minimum You Need To Do