Thoughts on "automated luxury communism", universal basic income and work

In this article I want to write some thoughts I have on how a different form of communism might lead to higher innovation and incentive than the one saw in the soviet union; I'll tell my reasons why I currently believe more efficient distributing resources instead of delivering a universal basic income; I'll write why the robotics assets we currently dispose today might stimulate more people to innovate instead of doing "the bare minimum" as it happened in the soviet union.

There exists different definitions of the word communism. To avoid misunderstandings, I'll define communism as the definition present in Wikipedia:

"The type of society and economic system postulated to emerge from technological advances in the productive forces, representing the ultimate goal of the political ideology of Communism. A communist society is characterized by common ownership of the means of production with free access to the articles of consumption and is classless and stateless, implying the end of the exploitation of labor."

Danila Tkachenko

From the collectivization of agricolture we know that the productivity decreased, leading to a famine that killed millions of people. People had less incentive to work for many reasons and sometimes they faked the achieved production to still have the bonus from the government. Even if the upper definition says about a stateless society, we know that the government gave orders to achieve certain levels of production. Otherwise they risked forced labor, gulag, death, etc. So I don't feel surprised that some people faked the results of their work.
Then Soviet Union emerged from feudalism, not from an industrial society like France, UK or Italy*. They didn't dispose the technological advances in the productive forces mentioned in the definition.

The Soviet Union transformed in an industrial society in a period of 40 years of growth, through a high taxation of agricolture. As we know from history, the trend of growth broke at the end of the 70s. But I don't want to continue with this part here.

Now I ask you to try to think with me to contextualize a communist country in the XXI century. Think about the algo-machines we dispose (I sometimes call them jobbot). Think about the output we'll have in some fields replacing human with robots, not completely in some. We wouldn't have less motivation to produce food, the robots would execute the orders contained in the code, possibly in an adaptive way when using automatic learning. We surely would require less humans to keep the economy going than the ones present in the soviet union.
This would also, in my opinion, reduce the risks of famine.

• With technologies like hydroponics, aeroponics, vertical farming we might create abundance with much less people employed in the food production area. Even if some doubts exist about vertical farming.

• Think about manufacturing. If we see some news, we see that jobbots continue to advance also in this area.

• Think about housing. 3D printing promises us cheaper houses that produces less waste in the construction. Even if I don't know, currently, a market adopted solution that applies 3D printing to housing, I think we'll see one in less than 8 years.

Now I want you to focus on the innovation element. From what I read, I saw that a free market stimulates more innovation than a planned economy. What if you plan only some parts of the economy? Like housing, food and a couple more things. What if you still allow people to allow private property even allowing them to dispose products that comes from a planned economy?
Example

Free market	Soviet Union "communism"	Hybrid system
180sqm house	80mq house	80sqm house or 180sqm house
"Super tasty" pasta	Pasta	"Super tasty" past or Pasta
Telsa model S P100D	Nissa leaf	Nissan Leaf or Tesla models
100mb internet	8 mb internet	8mb internet or other services

Some of you might think: how do the basic services of the hybrid system improve?
I thought about it more than 5 times: with acquisitions of private companies that improves the public companies efficiency or quality of the good/service. But I don't feel much convinced about the mechanics of the acquisitions. Or with the creation of competitions where citizens and private companies get rewards for the solutions they find.

Some hypothesis on the costs. An UBI in Italy would cost from 100 billions to 450 billions.
With the first amount one state might build different partly automated companies for food, housing, etc. I don’t want to dive into numbers because I feel confident I still don’t have the knowledge to make what I consider rigorous estimates in this field.

I prefer to show you some examples.
The company Barilla has over 2.7G€ in assets and sells products like past in different countries of the world. A Barilla-like company created by the state might produce the local demand of pasta like products and earn some income from exports. Using the revenues of Barilla, I suppose running a state owned company like this might cost less than 3.38G€ per year.

With much less than 90G€ of revenues of ENI we might cover energy. But ENI has also other fields, so some revenues come from other sectors (chemicals for example).

What about internet? It would cost around 21.54G€ per year, according to the revenues of Telecom.

With those examples I showed what we might cover with around 100G€/year. Take them with 5 pinches of salt.
Economies of scale reduce the prices of goods and services. From what I know, distributing 100G€/year doesn’t cost less, per unit, than distributing 10G€/year.

I believe the state owned companies I described, would have a pleasant incentive to automatize because of the fewer costs it would produce on the society. I think competitions about automation help.

Those state owned companies would allow people to spend less money on some goods and services. They might also decide to work less because of this. And the freed working hours lead to a cognitive surplus that people might use in science, art, etc.

And no, I don’t call such hybrid system automated luxury communism because you still find a state and cash.

• *At the unification of Italy, only some parts of Italy classified as industrial (like the region Piemonte, Lombardia, etc.). In the south they had a foreign monarchy.

Some sources:

• Why nations fail
• The liberal paradox

Disclaimer: I don't hold a legally recognized background in history or macroeconomics.