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Hey, at least you're at work, I'm on the first vacation I've had in like 7 years and still motteposting and doomscrolling 🙏
Now, I'm a fan of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism (the homosexuality is optional), so I'm all aboard the UBI train when it's time to leave the station (not today, the economy can't take it).
I think you're grossly correct in your assessment, Conservatives often decry Leftist ideology as utopian, which is a perfectly valid argument right until a potential utopia is on the horizon and we're asked to interview potential Peters to guard the Pearly Gates, some of them stricter bouncers than others.
The way I see it, without UBI of some degree, the default outcome for the vast majority of people who don't hold decent stakes in the corporations getting ultra wealthy off automation is starvation.
This UBI can come in the form of something that calls itself UBI, a bastardized form of existing welfare systems, or just outright philanthropy by trillionaires who aren't quite content to watch a good chunk of the populace starve before their eyes. But at the end of the day, some form of handouts are necessary, which leaves all but the most devoted Randians dejectedly standing in the bread lines when their turn comes.
However, if I had to add one consideration, it's the issue of exit rights.
The way I see it, any entity holding an initial stake in automation will become wildly wealthy in real terms. All it takes is a few such entities to be more altruistic than the rest for them to comfortably support the rejects and exiles that stricter and more moralizing polities won't tolerate.
A concrete example in today's world would be that SF and NY, flush with more money than most of the world can dream of, tolerated a great deal of drag from coddling the unwanted of the greater nation. It's a real shame that the homeless want to spoil the good thing they've got going, if they were just kind enough not to bite or shit on the hand that feeds them, they could count on bleeding hearts to keep them fed and watered indefinitely.
As such, I suspect that there will exist enough of such polities that people who aren't content with whatever UBI or handout they receive in their place of origin will simply drift over, and with resource scarcity being largely a non-issue, a tolerant government or society can then absorb a near indefinite amount of them.
That's all I'm willing to conjecture, the exact shape of the future is contingent on tiny perturbations none of us can do more than idly speculate about, and for once, I'm too busy buckling my seat belts worry overmuch about where exactly we're going. At any rate, all of us are in for one helluva ride!
I am pretty firmly of the opinion that any post-scarcity society we can build looks less like UBI socialism and more like massive deflation in the pricing of essentials driven by automation and capital investments.
There are plenty of commodities that used to be expensive and are now basically free. Salt and pepper used to be valuable commodities, but now are tossed carelessly in paper packets into food packaging and largely discarded. Within the last century we've driven food prices down to where basically nobody in the West dies of starvation because they can't afford food: there are plenty of charities that together manage to make sure everyone is fed, although I'll concede the nutrition is often lacking.
But I also think the hedonic treadmill is a powerful thing and we can relatively easily convince ourselves that things haven't objectively changed: to me post-scarcity seems doomed to always look like the distant future, but is actually an asymptote we can steadily approach.
So…even if the price of goods drops massively, everyone still has to have some income to avoid starvation. Where does that come from? A transition to the ever-shrinking sector of jobs resisting automation? 40 hours a week of make-work?
The unconditional part of UBI has to be its least palatable feature. So long as some people still have to work, they will find it unfair. But I think the world of 40-hours-of-means-testing is a worse one than just cutting everyone loose. It’s a real coordination problem.
The odds that we're ever going to reach a truly post-work future seem low. I think it's more likely that you'd see a) people working less, meaning that what quote unquote real work remains is spread across more people b) a (further) explosion in service jobs that previously would have been left to hobbyists. Being a HEMA coach or an MMO guild leader or 40k miniatures painter may not pay much, but when basically everything is too cheap to meter, 'not much' can actually pay for quite a lot.
(I will say, I think this is not quite around the corner as roboptimists think. Generative AI may detonate some professions, but I'm more skeptical of it quickly solving the problem of material abundance. I guess I should probably look into retraining as an electrician).
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