Nepal, Sept. 30 -- Nepal's National AI Policy (2025) promises higher productivity, better public services and a workforce ready for the Artificial Intelligence (AI) economy. These are reasonable, even necessary goals for a developing country like ours. But the policy is largely silent on socio-economic questions such as what happens to employment, the tax base and the state's ability to fund itself when machines begin to replace workers at scale.

In Nepal, unemployment already stands at around 10 percent. Tax revenue accounts for roughly 90 percent of government revenue, while remittances have recently been equivalent to 26 to 33 percent of national GDP. In the near future, if automation significantly shrinks formal wage employment, it c...