Uncle Ferd all for it... ... gettin' paid... ... to not work... ... beats the heck outta wringin' farts... ... outta shirt-tails atta dry cleanery.
Keep in mind that countries that provide a universal basic income do so because they believe that simply giving people enough for food, housing and a basic level of dignity (clean clothes and shampoo and such like) is cheaper than letting the same individuals turn to crime, or end up in hospital due to malnutrition-related diseases, attempted suicide and exposure from living in a cardboard box. By design, such programs provide a bare minimum - no cars, no vacations, no ipad - so that people still have an incentive to find work. As for the notion that someday we might have robots and computers doing all the work, and humanity is simply pensioned off, I can think of a couple of reasons why this might be difficult to achieve. First, there simply aren't enough resources in the world to support anything like an acceptable standard of living for everyone. The most efficient, self-reproducing, all-wise computerized robots imaginable could not create an economy so efficient that it could sustain all of our billions of people in comfort. So, first thing, we would need a lot smaller population. Second, humans have a deep-seated need for the social status that making a meaningful contribution to the community gives them. If only a tiny minority had "real" jobs (meaning jobs that, if they stopped doing it, there would be consequences) human society might simply stop reproducing, or fall into some other sort of collapse. Still, UN statisticians say the world's population will start declining sometime in this century, and if technology continues to progress, we might see a very gradual trend toward human redundancy. if it happens over a long enough period, we do have an adaptive mechanism in the sense that we are great at inventing roles for ourselves. In a society where our status no longer depended on practical contribution, we might all become artists, rock stars, composers, philosophers and such like. It would be mostly at a vacuous dilettante level, but as long as all our peers bought into this imaginary status structure, humans might still find it acceptable. Even in the present, life's meaning for many of us is less in our work than in our sport's team, or in restoring a vintage car on weekends, or travelling and reporting our travels - complete with pictures - online, as anyone who has retired - like me - discovers. I suspect in such a scenario there would still be a fringe of people who insisted on living a "real" life, the way some people now are survivalists, hermits, off-the-gridders and such like. Science and a few other specialized fields requiring out-of-box creativity would be the last to be abandoned by humans. It would be a very long time before artificial intelligence can match humans in creativity, adaptability, and dealing with the truly unexpected. If someday the World AI sends out interstellar explorers, I am pretty sure they will take along some humans - perhaps in cold storage - for insurance. There is of course also the popular science-fiction notion that we might simply amalgamate with our electronic offspring, and become something better - or at least other - than either. In that case, us mere primitive humans of today cannot imagine what the result might be.
Automation, for the most part, is severely overrated. Obviously that's where the money wants to go, and to a large degree many work tasks can and will be automated, but the scope of that is vastly exaggerated. I've spent my entire life working in manufacturing and construction, and the entire time I've been laughing as they attempt to find a machine to replace me, but for the time being I'm still looking at 40-60 hours a week for the rest of my life. The biggest flaw is that automation requires a system specific to each and every individual job/site, while that remains hugely unprofitable because companies are run by humans, and we have a tendency to be incredibly shortsighted. Not to mention that machines fail at a ridiculous level, and even the slightest variable really throws them off. Plus there's the whole deal with teaching machines how to think, and the implications of what will inevitably happen once they do.
