The idea behind BI is that you can still work, but if you don't work you still get to live. If you want more than the concrete block - fine. Go do something and earn money, but if not just STFU and live with what you get.
Yeah, and they're often a mess. You often have to sign up in a bunch of different places and deal with a bunch of different broken bureaucracies, which isn't the ideal thing to have dropped on your plate when financial hardship strikes. It's not surprising that, for example, "Only about 1 in 6 people who are eligible for child care subsidies actually get it."[1] Simplifying the system and having it already active when people hit a hardship would be a huge improvement.
I was reading a story about one cities dilapidated homeless shelter. The people there were living in poor conditions - the building's infrastructure was falling apart, the food provided was terrible, etc. It was costing the city $4,680 a month to house the people there. The people would be much better off if the city simply handed them that money - heck, they'd be much better off if the city simply handed them half of that.
[1] http://www.npr.org/2016/08/21/490822086/the-financial-trials...
It's already the case that if you don't work, you can "live". We should focus on making sure everyone can work if they want to, and their work will pay enough, which is the real problem at hand imo.
Do we crack down on automation? If so, how do we do that? And if we do, how do we stay competitive with the rest of the world?
The thing is, UBI has the potential to solve this. With a basic income, you're less likely to have to take a full time job you don't care about just to make sure the bills get paid. The labor market will shrink (and UBI allows that to be tuned), so there will be more jobs available, and there's no longer as much pressure to take an unfulfilling job.
This gives people options. Maybe instead of working a dreary office job full time, you work it part time (leaving hours open for someone else to fill), and spend the extra time with your family. Or maybe you take the extra time to foster a project you're passionate about. Maybe you tighten your belt and work on that project full time. And depending on how high the basic income is (which would be largely a function of how many crappy jobs we've automated), that passion project doesn't even have to be profitable. You can do what's rewarding instead of what puts food on your table.
This is, to me, the ultimate vision of humankind flourishing, sans-singularity. The only realistic alternatives I see are a massive increase in poverty, as we continue to convince ourselves that somehow price floors and retraining will save us, or a regulatory morass in which we try to stay one step ahead of the loopholes, preserving jobs that simply shouldn't be done by humans anymore.