UBI

It will happen. Maybe not right now, but soon. We'll all get a basic income to live on and we can fulfil our potential in whichever way we choose to. We may choose to continue to work, but nobody will have to do crappy zero hours jobs, so they will either have to be better paid or we'll just be served by robots in shops (more likely). My guess is that Universal Basic Income will only be facilitated once the economic revolution created by the emergence of cryptocurrencies is complete..or at least well underway.

FreeGreatPicture.com

UBI will perhaps be a key component of the economic revolution itself and ( I think) crypto can certainly help make it happen if the thinkers and decision makers get their ideas in order. UBI could even end up having it's own voluntary entry to society through the mass adoption of a counter-economy interfacing and eventually facing down a range of leading fiat currencies;

Let's call it a BloggingDollar err, I hear you say? that's Steem ? Gasp, shock horror , don't tell the feds, or the banks but do tell your local MP, governor, or other significant politician. OK I've gone way too far ahead here, but stay with me.. Admit it, this is a damn interesting concept and seen as how you're here (on STEEMIT), you're probably onto it.

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I've been interested in the concept of Universal Basic Income since I first heard about it a good few years back. The first compelling argument I heard for UBI was the idea that by giving everyone a set monthly stipend regardless of means testing, the savings to the administration of a benefits system would go a long way to covering the cost of means testing, monitoring and allocation of such a system..

Of course everyone who worked in the system would also be defunct and this is where it gets interesting. On top of that, the idea that many low & unskilled workers will inevitably lose their jobs to automation means that everyone still needs to eat and live or we have a zombie apocalyptic scenario looming and nobody wants that. Not even the super elite inhabitants of Necker Island ! who's going to make the coffee? oh yeah, the robots. Ok they probably don't really care, but everyone else does.

Still from Terra 2050 Robot Picked Tea - precisely 80 bags

(I did predict robot picked tea.) You could actually take 10 minutes out to watch the award winning animated short documentary film series I produced back in 2004 about the future, with lots of great insights by some terrific minds about all aspects of the future including the automation hopes & fears for just about every human activity WATCH Terra 2050 here
 
Still from Terra 2050 automated appetite

Automation

As the world moves relentlessly forward with automation, it seems once safe jobs are suddenly on the brink of extinction to be taken over by Artificially Intelligent programs. Not just the obvious car assembly workers who have largely been superseded by robot welders. They are so accurate and efficient that they produce a higher quality machined product than people. sorry people, I mean in conjunction with people.. but they do, don't they Nissan. They also don't get tired, want a pay rise, have sick days (surely they do sometimes break down !) or argue about whether 25 or 30 days annual leave is more appropriate after 10 years service.

phys.org

There are a whole raft of white collar jobs including legal, insurance, trading and banking which could be automated in the next few years. Indeed the whole commodities trading market is being completed by algorithmic transactions, supervised by human eyes. It will soon be supervision by a faster, more accurate machine.

Tax Revenues

If all the work is done by robots and we live in an idyllic future where everyone wears leisure suits, spends endless sunny day on the tennis court, at the beach and in the gym (read spends all day - every day on steemit) how will it all be paid for. Henry Ford realised this when he set out to make the Model T Ford.. He knew, his workers had to be able to afford one or there would be nobody to buy the product. We know Amazon, Google, Apple, Paypal, Ebay and a zillion other tech firms make huge profits, largely from the revenues of automated technology. They also employ millions of lucky human sparks between them but if corporations own all the tech which makes everything we need.. do we need to tax the robots ?

Elysium

Hell yes we do or we lead to a future very soon like Neill Blomkamp's sci-fi film, Elysiumwhere the rich few live in off world immortality and everyone else lives in the dirt with the everyday robots.. Oh yeah, it's no coincidence that * The film's Earth-bound scenes were shot in a dump in the poor Iztapalapa district on the outskirts of Mexico City, while the scenes for Elysium were shot in Vancouver and the wealthy Huixquilucan-Interlomas suburbs of Mexico City. = wiki source

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UBI Experiments

There have been quite a few experiments on small scale communities where the idea was to test the impact on communities and individuals life chances / spending outcomes. The basic, (pardon the pun) outcomes from some of the findings is that people didn't just get drunk with the free money but more kids went to school. Interesting, although it also didn't really affect health or house ownership.. I'd say it sounds like a promising start.

 
READ HERE FOR A LIST OF PILOT PROJECTS
There are quite a few in the pipeline. They will be carefully analysed. Perhaps piece by piece, eventually everyone will have a blogdollar debit card and the blockchain will take care of the rest !

Professor Doctor Yanis Varoufakis

Yanis Varoufak gives a compelling argument for UBI in this excellent youtube clip