I think the only way to go is to do basic income funded by an automation tax. Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages.
In particular, you can use tax policy that actually pushes the economy in the directions you want to fund UBI. Carbon taxes are opinionated in the right direction, or a VAT tax is not opinionated but closes loopholes exploited by businesses like Google and Amazon. You don't want taxes that disencentivize behavior that you want - it is one of the reasons I'm flabbergasted US property tax law exists as it does, because it could be opinionated to incentivize ownership but isn't because of a mix of inertia and manipulation by vested interests to keep it the way it is.
And there is kind of a doublethink in that statement. To stop automation requires state intervention in the first place. It would, naturally, be done on behest of corporations who want to prevent automation competing with them in some form, but I imagine the money backing automation outweighs the resistance on that front. If the government is out of the control of the people, automation cannot be stopped anyway. Reclaiming democracy is necessary regardless of if you have an automation employment crisis or not because if you don't have influence over your own destiny malicious entities that do will insure you suffer for it.
this won't happen automatically. it will have to be a conscious decision. how do you propose to get there instead of the dystopian future where things are infinitely more scarce for some and not for others which seems to be our default trajectory
Automation has overall improved quality of life significantly. We can now grow so much food that we can easily feed the world many times over. Clothing has become so cheap that many items are practically free. And trips around the world are no longer accessible to only that top 0.1-1%. It's not all gloom and doom.
But we might just not want it _yet_. There’s a lot of work to be done first to prepare people for being layed off, reskilled, or retired en masse.
Can't make money by paying people to buy your products. Ford raised wages in order to attract better workers and reduce employee turnover.
This has basically never been true in the history of work-saving technology improvements. Such advances tend to create entirely new, previously impossible jobs.
Your statement tends to be true when automation involves some kind of revolutionary technological paradigm shift, and the number of people being automated out of work is sufficiently small that societies can easily reabsorb them into the workforce. But most modern automation doesn't create new jobs or new technologies, the infrastructure for automation already exists and is stable. It just removes jobs, and at an unprecedented scale.
This is going to sound like a crude joke, but it's not: baby maker.
I am not hopeful about the future.
If that were true then we'd see record unemployment and virtually no open job reqs. We see the opposite, therefore, it isn't true. In the UK unemployment is at near all time lows, wages are climbing 3x faster than inflation. It's a good time to be a worker despite equally record levels of automation.
As for which jobs are absorbing people whose former work was automated, who knows?
If you insist on endless cynicism, a lot of the people freed up by automation of food factory jobs went and got worthless degrees and now sit in comfy offices creating pointless PowerPoints, earning/burning money to justify the bosses departmental budget. Don't assume everyone who started out burger flipping stays in food service forever!
like this? https://www.vox.com/2018/5/8/17308744/bullshit-jobs-book-dav...
This is a pernicious myth that needs to die - Ford increased wages to reduce turnover and thus the costs associated with it - if a few employees on the margins could then afford to buy his cars then all the better, but it would not appreciably increase demand. It doesn’t even make sense logically.
And you only need one culturally persistent counterexample for this to end badly.