Automation will not reduce overall jobs same way industrialization did not do that. Automation will create more jobs in services instead. Basic income is crazy socialist dream that was tested in communism already and it failed.
In fact, basic income is much more capitalistic than existing social safety net systems because it maintains the assumption that if disadvantaged people are actors in the market, that the overall system will be more efficient than specific government-specified handouts.
Really the question underlying basic income and safety nets in general is to what extent every citizen in a modern society should have access to goods, regardless of their contribution. Once society has decided how much access such citizens should have, welfare vs basic income becomes a question of efficiency and optimization as opposed to ideology.
As for automation not reducing overall jobs--as someone who works in automation I don't see how it will magically create more service jobs. There are few jobs today that employ large numbers of people that are not in danger of being replaced by automation--and the whole point of automation and efficiency is to minimize the number of people required to maintain the system. I do think service jobs become the way people become gainfully employed in an automation world, but that society will need to expand its definition of what is a job worthy of recompense--for example someone could decide to become an artist, and actually have that be a renumerative profession.
Absolutely this. And if we're honest with ourselves - if someone will die for want of something relatively cheap that the state can easily provide (like food, water, shelter, or antibiotics), can you really justify condemning them to death because they can't afford it? Sure, you want to encourage people to contribute to society, but do you really want that encouragement to be the threat of annihilation?
> (Craig Lambert) includes the rise of technology and robotics as forces leading to the growth of shadow work
Also, basic income is a concept coming straight from liberalism. The comparison to communism isn't even remotely accurate.
Well, there was basic income in some communist countries and it failed on a social level.
Communism is the government telling you what your job is and giving you a minimal amount of resources and prohibiting you from earning a single extra dollar, and your choices are either take it or escape to West Germany.
A basic income is the government unconditionally giving you enough money that you don't starve. Then if you want to e.g. own a car or send your kids to college or live in a city, you have to go out and get a job, which you can do however you like.
Not really. That was replacing human workers with new machines. New factories were needed to build those new machines. New supply chains were needed to supply those factories. New materials were being used in manufacturing.
Replacing those human workers required so many new things that it created a vast number of new job, much more than were lost.
Now we are tending to replace human works with old machines. Take a self-driving truck. That's just a normal truck (an old machine), with some computers (old machines) added, some motors (old machines) added to actuate the controls, and some sensors (old machines) added to provide input to the software.
Note that not many new physical things are required for self-driving trucks. The novelty is in the combination, and in custom software and some custom electronics. Custom software and electronics do not generate many jobs--it takes the same number of programmers and electrical engineers regardless of whether you are making one truck or a billion trucks. For the non-new physical things needed, like motors to move controls, orders go up at motor factories and maybe they have to add a shift and so that creates some jobs. But the motor factory is likely highly automated, and so adding a shift just represents a handful of jobs.