One fundamental challenge with basic income that gets overlooked is that if you’re a smart person and you’ve built a career where you make a lot of money, you have cash flow issues that prevent you from going to basic income. It’s a huge sacrifice that requires drastic quality of life changes which means the people who will be subsisting on that aren’t the people who have the motivation to set up that room nor are necessarily going to be people you want running it.

Universal income is a fancy name around what happened in Soviet Union with the key difference is that in the Soviet Union you were forced to work to collect it - you couldn’t not work. The whole “make work optional” part of the idea sounds like it adds a “fun” new twist on the outcome if “fun” means dystopia.

It is hilarious to me that all the AI CEOs are libertarians and right wingers that complain about welfare fraud and espouse Ayn Rand yet at the same time push for UBI which is essentially a form of communism.

The problem with paying everyone the same wage is that it disincentivizes personal growth and those that have invested in that growth don’t get rewarded. The problem with not investing in personal growth is you end up with a socially ill population in a death spiral. Russia still hasn’t recovered from the Communists and the imperialists before them. China has had to be quite violent and repressive to create stability.

UBI is in addition to whatever you can make from a wage and the B stands for not very high, just barely high enough to live.