Basically flawed
economist.com
economist.com
I think it's a given because technology reduces the need for labor in that it allows fewer people to provide for the same needs. If we continue to rely on "work as the main mechanism which allocates spending power" we'll run into a huge problem when only a few people are "working."
If we just plain don't need everybody to work in order to provide for everybody's needs...then we'll need a way OTHER THAN work to distribute the stuff everybody needs. We'll either invent activities that aren't actually work (like Japan assigning people to open doors) or we'll give people what they need without asking them to work for it.
People who grok technology seem to agree on this conclusion even if they don't arrive at it in quite the same way.
The idea is that instead of the government giving money directly to people (GBI), the government pays to research, develop, and implement automation of the production of goods. The goal for each given good is to set up a production and distribution chain that has very little human involvement, and is publicly owned, with the output being given away to the public.
So, over time, good by good, things move from the market economy, where you have to have a source of money in order to get them, to the public economy, where they are produced publicly and you have a share of the output. For instance, take food. There are several crops now whose production is largely automated, with planting, fertilizing, watering, harvesting, and packaging done by machine. We are at most a couple of decades away from automating much of the distribution from farm to city.
Within 30 years we could have publicly owned mostly automated production and distribution of sufficient food crops so that every citizen's share would be enough to live well from.
Aside from housing, I see no reason that we cannot, within 40 years, have a sufficient variety of goods produced this way that those who wish to can live comfortably entirely on their share of the publicly owned factory and farm output.
There will still be tasks that cannot be automated (at least for a very long time), and so there will be a path for those who want more than is provided by the public output to earn money to buy those things only available in the market economy.
The automation will happen, getting rid of large classes of jobs completely and in many others making it so 1 human can do what formerly required dozens. The number of jobs created designing and maintaining the machines won't be anywhere near the number eliminated, so we are going to have to find some way to cope with very large unemployment.
Is it now.